Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscape artists often sketched outdoors in oil paint on paper to capture nature from direct observation. Yet as natural as these scenes look, the vantages were chosen or augmented to draw the viewer into the composition. Whether through adding a prescribed path, capturing flecks of light glinting off a winding river, or presenting a series of plateaus receding into the distance, artists created a point of entry and route along which the viewer could journey.
From the tales of famous travelers like Marco Polo and Alexander the Great to the ancient encyclopedias of Pliny and Isidore, medieval conceptions of the world were often based more on authoritative tradition than direct observation.
To mark the 2024 centenary of its life as a public institution, the Morgan Library & Museum will present a major exhibition devoted to the life and career of its inaugural director, Belle da Costa Greene (1879–1950).
When Franz Kafka died of tuberculosis at the age of forty, in 1924, few could have predicted the influence his relatively small body of work would have on every realm of thought and creative endeavor over the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.
One camera, one viewfinder: photography is often understood as a solitary practice. Throughout the medium’s history, however, artists have challenged the notion of one-person authorship.
American artist Walton Ford (b. 1960) established his reputation in the 1990s with his monumental watercolor paintings of wild animals inspired by true or legendary stories of dramatic encounters between humankind and nature.
The Morgan celebrates the 100th year of its founding with a series of exhibitions devoted to promised gifts to the museum, including twenty-eight drawings from the holdings of New York–based collectors Elizabeth and Jean-Marie Eveillard.
The exhibition Far and Away: Drawings from the Clement C. Moore Collection, on view upstairs, celebrates the promised gift of works to the Morgan from one of the preeminent private collections of Dutch drawings in America.
Robert Owen Lehman’s extraordinary collection of music manuscripts has been an inspiration to scholars and visitors since it was placed on deposit at the Morgan Library & Museum.
