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In the 1950s the young, provocative writers now known as the Beat Generation emerged onto the American literary scene. Heavily inspired by European Surrealism and the jazz culture of Black America, the Beats were experimental and politically dissident in both their lifestyles and written work.

This exhibition explores the history of the medium as a lucid, literate—but not always literal—tool of persuasion.

A museum and independent research library, the Morgan Library & Museum began as the personal library of financier, collector, and cultural benefactor John Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913). As early as 1890, Morgan had begun to assemble a collection of illuminated, literary, and historical manuscripts, early printed books, and old master drawings and prints.

Creator of unforgettable animal characters like Peter Rabbit, Jeremy Fisher, and Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, the beloved children’s book author and illustrator Beatrix Potter (1866–1943) rooted her fiction in the natural world.

As both artists and patrons, women played an important role in the development of the natural sciences in the early modern period.

To Observe and Imagine: British Drawings and Watercolors from the Morgan Library, 1600–1900, was a major survey of the Morgan's important collection of British drawings. The basis of this group dates to Pierpont Morgan's well-known 1909 purchase of virtually all the holdings of Charles Fairfax Murray, the English Pre-Raphaelite artist and collector.

This exhibition celebrates the Morgan’s 2018 acquisition of eleven drawings from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, an organization dedicated to supporting Black Southern artists and their communities.

Every holiday season, the Morgan displays Charles Dickens's original manuscript of A Christmas Carol in Pierpont Morgan's historic Library.

Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694–1774) was one of the earliest and most important collectors of old master drawings and he played a pivotal role in shaping our modern conception of the old masters.

Some sixty of Lequeu’s several hundred drawings will be on view in Jean‐Jacques Lequeu: Visionary Architect, the first museum retrospective to bring significant public and scholarly attention to one of the most imaginative architects of the Enlightenment.