Frederick Krieg’s colorful design for a two-part part tile pattern is depicted in a three by three grid. The result is an alternating composition that maintains unity through repeated colors (light blue, bisque, and charcoal) and angles (hexagonal and inverted). Krieg’s precision is all the more impressive given the medium: watercolor paint. A self-taught designer...
Title: The Architect, builder and woodworker. Publisher: New York [etc.] C.D. Lakey [etc.] 1868- Smithsonian Libraries Reference Number: NA1. A43 CHMRU Builder and Wood-Worker Masthead. Vol. 18, no.2 Feb, 1882. NA1. A43 CHMRU The Cooper Hewitt Library collects a variety of trade periodicals, especially those dealing with architecture and the building trades. The Architect,...
A snowy terrace, ebullient pink-tinged amaryllises, and a scarlet-coiffed maiden distinguish this winter-themed print by Eugène Samuel Grasset (Swiss, 1841-1917, active Paris, France, 1871-1917). The print, which spells out “Décembre” in the upper left-hand corner, was a part of a set of calendar prints, organized by month. Cooper Hewitt has eight of these prints in...
Christina Malman’s 1935 drawing of a woman embracing a dog is both aesthetically magnetic and brimming with affect. Using a brush with black ink and white gouache, Malman masterfully utilizes positive and negative space to create simplified forms that are at once sleekly modern and yet familiar. The figures are depicted in a kind of...
On January 16, 1919, the congress of the United States of America ratified the 18th amendment, prohibiting the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors.[i]” And so, after years of fervent lobbying by groups such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the U.S. entered a short-lived period in which alcohol was forbidden (but still widely...
Charles Salagnad made this drawing in 1872, during a phase of renovations at the now-famous Newport mansion, Château-sur-Mer. The house was built two decades earlier for the wealthy China trader William Shepard Wetmore (1801-1862). Wetmore’s newly married son, George Peabody Wetmore, commissioned one of Gilded Age society’s preferred architects, Richard Morris Hunt, to transform his late...
A cob of dizzyingly technicolored corn shoots to the top of Felice Rix-Ueno’s textile design Feldfruchte: Steel with Indigo and Brown. Sheaves of wheat and grains float around the bright maize. As summer draws to a close, few foods resonate more than corn, sweet and sun-ripened in the hazy days of August. Rix-Ueno’s title draws...
Against a bright seascape, the type that reminds one so strongly of a summer day at the beach that it is almost possible to smell the salty air, oversized and misshapen shells are scattered haphazardly. They fill the foreground of Royal Copenhagen’s poster like beached whales: awkward, commanding, and strangely beautiful. The storied Danish ceramics...
This raucous drawing was made by English printmaker (Isaac) Robert Cruikshank in 1836. Cruikshank’s dense scene includes genteel figures seated around an enormous, decorated cake while others, emboldened by inebriation, climb a rafter at the left. Two oversized and garish figures both literally and figuratively steal the cake; however: the male figure holds a full...
