New York Art Worlds, 1870–1890

Beaux was the most celebrated turn-of-the-twentieth-century woman painter of figures working in the United States. She achieved her first commercial success with naturalistic portraits on porcelain, a popular art form of the period pursued by both professional women artists and amateurs. Having trained for just one month with the French ceramicist Camille Piton, an experience that strengthened Beaux’s technical precision and sensitivity to color, she quickly obtained a reputation for this work, which she noted "parents nearly wept over." While largely based in Philadelphia, Beaux opened a painting studio on Washington Square in 1899. A decade earlier, she had been introduced to the Gilders, forging a close friendship with the family who would become major supporters of her art.

Before The Met began to purchase contemporary American art in the early twentieth century, New Movement artists attracted the institution’s notice by gifting donations. Produced just before Bunker’s premature death, this evocative portrait of his wife, Eleanor (1869–1953), is one of several American paintings given to the Museum to honor an artist during the late nineteenth century. The sitter appears strongly illuminated against a dark background, her laurel crown alluding to classical ideals. Sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and architects Stanford White, who designed this striking frame, and Charles A. Platt, who later married Eleanor Bunker, organized a subscription effort through the Society of American Artists to acquire the painting for the Museum.

Chase met Alice Gerson (1866–1927), whose father managed a successful New York lithography firm, in 1879 or 1880. The couple married in 1887 and settled in Brooklyn, where Chase painted his first park scenes with his wife serving as his favorite model. Significantly, the year of their marriage coincided with end of the Tile Club’s active existence, as the fraternal and economic purposes of the organization were no longer central to the New Movement artists, who increasingly represented the city’s art establishment. J. Carroll Beckwith, part of that circle and to whom Chase inscribed and gave this tonal sketch, taught with him at the Art Students League of New York.

Illustrated book, 336 pages. Red publisher's cover stamped with designs in gold and black. Green end papers. The contents originally appeared as an influential series of articles in Scribner's Magazine, 1875-77.

De Kay (later Gilder) is better known for her role as a progressive cultural tastemaker in nineteenth-century New York than for her paintings. She established Friday salons at her home, known as The Studio, organized a Saturday-morning sketch club, and co-founded both the Art Students League and the Society of American Artists. Her magnetic personality and leadership were directly responsible for the large number of women involved in those organizations. This paint box, a rare survivor of her artistic practice, reveals much about training for women at the time. The nude study dates the work to around 1871, the year when life classes were first open to women at the National Academy of Design. De Kay also studied informally with Winslow Homer and John La Farge.

Eakins began this portrait shortly after his marriage to his former student, Susan Hannah Macdowell (1851–1938), a talented painter and photographer. The setting is his studio in Philadelphia, where the couple—and their dog, Harry—lived from 1884 to 1886. In this haunting work, Eakins’s wife wears an Empire-style gown and sits in an eighteenth-century chair with a Japanese picture book on her lap—accessories that symbolize the artist’s Aesthetic ideals. Displayed in New York at the 1887 exhibition of the Society of American Artists, the painting was criticized for its "disastrous effects." Today, it is considered one of Eakins’s most important works.

American artists eager to maintain their connections to adventures abroad imported European bohemianism to New York life, providing them with novel subject matter. Whether Homer painted The Studio during his eleven-month stay in Paris, or later, while in New York, this informal scene of music-making reveals a French influence in both form and content. Throughout the 1860s and ’70s, Homer occupied studios in a variety of purpose-built, all-male facilities, including the University Building on Washington Square, the Tenth Street Studio Building, and the Benedick Building at 80 Washington Square East. As part of this studio culture, he enjoyed an active social life, frequenting the Gilders’ salon and joining the Tile Club (among other artist organizations), before leaving the city for Maine in 1884.

This painted ceramic fireplace surround was produced during the artist’s active involvement with the Tile Club. Of all the members, Homer appears to have been among the most serious, producing several individual tiles and two ambitious surrounds that he copyrighted, suggesting commercial intent. This design’s pastoral figures in imagined "old-fashioned" dress evoke both the storybook work of English artist Walter Crane as well as Homer’s own watercolors of contemporary shepherdesses. Edwin Austin Abbey, one of the original "Tilers" and whose former studio on Tenth Street later served as the Club’s permanent home, also painted an ambitious mantelpiece design with similarly historicized figures.

This lavish artist’s book is Vedder’s masterwork, representing the most visible expression of his deep engagement with the Aesthetic Movement during his New York sojourn in the early 1880s. Non-commissioned, it was designed entirely by the artist—the stamped leather cover featuring Vedder’s "cosmic swirl of life," the endpapers, the lettering, and fifty-six full-page illustrations or "accompaniments"—and became both an artistic and commercial success. It was issued in two formats: a deluxe, limited-edition printing of one hundred copies, and a more affordable version with a printed cover.

According to Gilder family tradition, La Farge created this window as a tenth-wedding anniversary gift for his close friends, painter Helena de Kay and her husband, Richard Watson Gilder, editor of The Century Magazine. It is composed of opalescent glass and delicate glass "jewels," characteristics of La Farge’s early designs, and features a marriage wreath encircling the couple’s initials and the year 1874. The window was originally installed in the Gilders’ home at 103 East Fifteenth Street, a popular gathering place for artists and writers. When the family moved around 1888, the panel was detached from its architectural setting and set into an ornamental brass frame, possibly of Stanford White’s design, to form a freestanding fire screen.

By the late 1860s, educational opportunities in New York for women artists had expanded from private lessons with established painters to schools, notably the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, established in 1859, and the Ladies’ Art Association, launched in 1867. In this work, seven industrious students pursue painting, drawing, and sculpture in an unidentified, skylit studio filled with artistic bric-a-brac. Lang meticulously details the necessary supplies for professional training, including print portfolios, a paint-laden palette, plaster sculptures, architectural fragments, and easels.

Escosura, a Paris-based genre painter, arrived in the United States in autumn 1876 to visit the Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia and to work in New York for a few months. His ambitious canvas depicts a sale of decorative objects at Clinton Hall (once located at Astor Place), although it is not possible to identify the specific auction. Escosura, himself a voracious collector, introduced multiple narrative threads in the work—from the bewhiskered auctioneers on the podium to the fashionably dressed clientele clutching catalogues to the inattentive man at lower right. The artist exhibited the painting in the Paris Salon of 1877 and later presented it to The Met, a gift brokered by art dealer and trustee Samuel P. Avery.

This collaboration between a painter and a designer-entrepreneur reveals the creative synergies of late nineteenth-century New York’s overlapping cultural circles. Cottier combined his artistic and business talents in the marketing of Aesthetic goods in both London and New York. His gallery at 144 Fifth Avenue, along the Ladies Mile, hosted exhibitions of progressive American and European art and employed painters like Maris and Albert Pinkham Ryder to produce decorative objects. These efforts laid the groundwork for the Society of American Artists’ formation in 1877. Cottier’s and Maris’s stained glass—including this example featuring a subject from Arthurian legend by way of the poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson—emulated that of the English Pre-Raphaelites.

Millet, who specialized in American and English costume figure paintings, first visited Broadway, the picturesque English village, in 1884. His home and studio there, near Edwin Austin Abbey’s, would become the center of an Anglo-American artist colony. In A Cosey Corner, an early contemporary gift to The Met, the sitter’s dress is a romantic recreation of several different eighteenth-century styles as is the interior architecture. Many features of the room also correspond to a published description of the colonial New England kitchen in Millet’s East Bridgewater, Massachusetts, studio. An active member of New Movement circles in New York and Europe, Millet was featured in Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer’s Book of American Figure Painters.

Best known for his naturalistic portraits, O’Donovan was at the epicenter of the New York art world in the 1870s. When he modeled this truthful, if diminutive, likeness of Homer from life, both men worked in the Tenth Street Studio Building—a locus for both older-generation and younger New Movement artists—and were soon to be founding members of the Tile Club. O’Donovan exhibited Homer’s portrait at the established National Academy of Design in 1878 and again the following year at the more progressive Society of American Artists. Both artists were elected to membership in each organization, a testament to their knack for navigating varied artistic spheres.

This plaque is the only known decorative artwork produced by Porter, a painter who trained at the National Academy of Design, maintained a studio in New York between 1875 and 1877, and continued to exhibit his work in local venues the following decade. The tile dates to his association with the Society of Decorative Arts in Hartford, Connecticut; Porter was one of the few professional artists, and the only man, to participate in the society’s inaugural exhibition in April 1880. Around that time—perhaps inspired by the Hartford home of Samuel Clemens (also known as Mark Twain), designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany’s Associated Artists—Porter was experimenting with other Aesthetic subjects in oil and watercolor painting, the only African American painter documented to do so.

Better known for his evocative easel paintings, Ryder worked in the applied arts in the late 1870s and early 1880s, mainly for Cottier & Co., the Aesthetic decorating firm established in New York in 1873. Only a few examples of this design work remain, such as mirror frames (including one commissioned by Charles de Kay, brother of Helena de Kay, art critic for the New York Times, and key supporter of Ryder and other New Movement artists) as well as fragments of screens and cabinet panels. This imaginative panoramic landscape painted on gilded leather may have been intended as ornament for furniture. It combines New York scenery familiar to Ryder: a bit of the skyline as seen from Central Park and the High Bridge that spans the Harlem River.

Between 1877 and 1880, Saint-Gaudens completed around twenty informal, low-relief portraits of artists and friends, many of whom were part of his intertwined social and professional orbits. He collaborated on civic projects with New York architects Charles McKim and Stanford White, painted murals in Boston’s Trinity Church with Francis Davis Millet, co-founded the Society of American Artists in 1877 with Helena de Kay, and enjoyed critical praise from journalist Richard Watson Gilder. The reliefs reveal the sculptor’s preference for shoulder-length profile portraits with personalized inscriptions and attributes, a format he also adapted to commissioned likenesses, such as the bronze of collector and tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s sons.

Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer (1851–1934) was among the most perceptive critics of American art and architecture in the late nineteenth century. She steadfastly championed Saint-Gaudens in her articles on his public monuments and relief sculptures. In this elegant vertical portrait, the sculptor made full use of bronze’s textural possibilities by contrasting the lively surfaces of the sitter’s dress and collar with her smooth skin. The inscription—animvs non opvs (the spirit, not the work)—refers to Van Rensselaer’s Aesthetic ideals that were in sympathy with the cosmopolitan artists and architects she promoted. The bronze is encased in a carved oak frame designed by Stanford White.

Between 1877 and 1880, Saint-Gaudens completed around twenty informal, low-relief portraits of artists and friends, many of whom were part of his intertwined social and professional orbits. He collaborated on civic projects with New York architects Charles McKim and Stanford White, painted murals in Boston’s Trinity Church with Francis Davis Millet, co-founded the Society of American Artists in 1877 with Helena de Kay, and enjoyed critical praise from journalist Richard Watson Gilder. The reliefs reveal the sculptor’s preference for shoulder-length profile portraits with personalized inscriptions and attributes, a format he also adapted to commissioned likenesses, such as the bronze of collector and tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s sons.

Between 1877 and 1880, Saint-Gaudens completed around twenty informal, low-relief portraits of artists and friends, many of whom were part of his intertwined social and professional orbits. He collaborated on civic projects with New York architects Charles McKim and Stanford White, painted murals in Boston’s Trinity Church with Francis Davis Millet, co-founded the Society of American Artists in 1877 with Helena de Kay, and enjoyed critical praise from journalist Richard Watson Gilder. The reliefs reveal the sculptor’s preference for shoulder-length profile portraits with personalized inscriptions and attributes, a format he also adapted to commissioned likenesses, such as the bronze of collector and tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s sons.

Between 1877 and 1880, Saint-Gaudens completed around twenty informal, low-relief portraits of artists and friends, many of whom were part of his intertwined social and professional orbits. He collaborated on civic projects with New York architects Charles McKim and Stanford White, painted murals in Boston’s Trinity Church with Francis Davis Millet, co-founded the Society of American Artists in 1877 with Helena de Kay, and enjoyed critical praise from journalist Richard Watson Gilder. The reliefs reveal the sculptor’s preference for shoulder-length profile portraits with personalized inscriptions and attributes, a format he also adapted to commissioned likenesses, such as the bronze of collector and tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s sons.

Between 1877 and 1880, Saint-Gaudens completed around twenty informal, low-relief portraits of artists and friends, many of whom were part of his intertwined social and professional orbits. He collaborated on civic projects with New York architects Charles McKim and Stanford White, painted murals in Boston’s Trinity Church with Francis Davis Millet, co-founded the Society of American Artists in 1877 with Helena de Kay, and enjoyed critical praise from journalist Richard Watson Gilder. The reliefs reveal the sculptor’s preference for shoulder-length profile portraits with personalized inscriptions and attributes, a format he also adapted to commissioned likenesses, such as the bronze of collector and tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s sons.

Between 1877 and 1880, Saint-Gaudens completed around twenty informal, low-relief portraits of artists and friends, many of whom were part of his intertwined social and professional orbits. He collaborated on civic projects with New York architects Charles McKim and Stanford White, painted murals in Boston’s Trinity Church with Francis Davis Millet, co-founded the Society of American Artists in 1877 with Helena de Kay, and enjoyed critical praise from journalist Richard Watson Gilder. The reliefs reveal the sculptor’s preference for shoulder-length profile portraits with personalized inscriptions and attributes, a format he also adapted to commissioned likenesses, such as the bronze of collector and tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s sons.

This extraordinary window dates from the earliest and most innovative period of Tiffany’s career. The abstracted vegetal blossom in the central panel, the agitated vines of glass, the experimental "confetti" glass, and the translucent beach quartz all contribute to its inventiveness. The large pebbles are affixed to the borders using lead came, metal strips utilized by stained-glass workers to join pieces together. The presence of two original metal rings at the top of the panel, as well as the irregular frame, indicate that the panel was never intended to be permanently installed, but hung from chains in front of a window.

This deluxe artists’ book reveals the seriousness with which members of the Tile Club approached their cultural practice. An influential association of leading late nineteenth-century painters, sculptors, illustrators, writers, architects, and designers, the Club expressed its decorative interests in a rhetoric of playful camaraderie. In publications such as this, members detailed their genteel bohemianism and artistic lifestyles, suggesting the importance that professional self-promotion held for the group. This book represents the last major creative collaboration of the Club.

Van Rensselaer’s lavish folio of art, essays, and poetry features figurative work by forty mainly European-trained artists, represented in photogravure plates as well as on the book’s cover and throughout its contents. An illustration of one of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s angels for the Edwin D. Morgan family tomb appears on the title page, two years after the incomplete marbles were destroyed by a fire at Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford, Connecticut. The idealized figure holding a scroll must have appealed to Van Rensselaer for its Italian Renaissance inflection, a style she considered important and recommended to other artists.

Vedder based this painting, in its elaborate Italian revival-style frame, on one of his drawings for the 1884 artist’s book, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. He had been introduced to a translation of the twelfth-century Persian poet-astronomer’s treatise on the joys of daily life and mysteries of death in 1871, and his appreciation for it deepened after the death of his first son. Rubáiyát haunted him for decades, marking a new phase in Vedder’s career and leading to many related paintings and decorative designs. The artist’s rich, thematic material for the text continued to resonate with public debates over culture, religion, and science well into the early twentieth century.

In spring 1860, the Chicago sculptor Leonard Wells Volk made life molds of the face and hands of Abraham Lincoln, then a presidential candidate. Together Saint-Gaudens, New York collectors Thomas B. Clarke and Erwin Davis, and journalist Richard Watson Gilder purchased the original plaster casts to present to the United States government in 1888 (now at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History). To offset the cost, they sold bronze and plaster casts of Volk’s originals to subscribers, with production supervised by Saint-Gaudens.

In spring 1860, the Chicago sculptor Leonard Wells Volk made life molds of the face and hands of Abraham Lincoln, then a presidential candidate. Together Saint-Gaudens, New York collectors Thomas B. Clarke and Erwin Davis, and journalist Richard Watson Gilder purchased the original plaster casts to present to the United States government in 1888 (now at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History). To offset the cost, they sold bronze and plaster casts of Volk’s originals to subscribers, with production supervised by Saint-Gaudens.

As the first president of the Art Students League, founded in 1875, Waller advocated for the educational mission of museums. In this work, the artist depicts The Met’s second location between 1873 and 1879, the Douglas Mansion, formerly at 128 West Fourteenth Street. From the Museum’s earliest years, sculpture held a dominant physical presence in its galleries, as this view attests. Based on drawings made on-site, Waller carefully recorded the entrance hall, later noting that, "as far as it goes, it may be depended upon as accurate, and therefor [sic] historical." Here, a woman attentively consults a guidebook in front of William Wetmore Story’s Polyxena (1873), then on loan to The Met and now in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum.

Warner and the painter J. Alden Weir (1852–1919) trained in Paris, but they likely met by 1877 in New York when the two men were elected charter members of the Society of American Artists. In 1880, they both occupied studios in the Benedick Building on Washington Square, a location for bachelor artists, and they possibly agreed to sit for each other as a demonstration of artistic camaraderie. Here, Warner captures Weir’s youthful vigor—his wavy hair, defined features, and alert gaze. When exhibited at the Society of American Artists in the same year, the bust was hailed for assuredly melding a classical artistic lineage with a modern French Beaux-Arts naturalism.

This self-portrait, which La Farge painted in October 1859 at his family's estate in Glen Cove, Long Island, reflects his use of a photograph as a pictorial source; his appreciation of the unmodulated shapes and flattened space of Japanese prints; his reliance on broad tonal masses in the manner of his teachers, Thomas Couture and William Morris Hunt; and his experiments in plein-air landscape painting. The artist portrays himself as a landscapist ready to embark on a painting expedition.

Bridges is one of the few American women who became a prominent professional artist during the Civil War years. Celebrated then and now for her meticulous, naturalistic depictions of flora and fauna, she developed her own distinctive approach to capturing quiet moments in nature. Bridges, a student of William Trost Richards at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, embraced his Ruskinian ‘truth to nature’ approach to great effect—first in oil, then, increasingly, in watercolor, a medium in which she came to specialize over a successful and prolific fifty-year career.

Bridges’ oil paintings are far rarer than her watercolors, and mostly date to the 1860s. This example, from 1870, marks a transitional moment in her career, as she would soon turn to watercolor almost exclusively. The oil’s freshness—the seemingly just-picked violets and ferns bear a trace of brown earth—exemplifies Bridges’ commitment to depicting natural elements with immediacy and intimacy, what Richards described as ‘the voice of nature speaking in the idiom of art.’

In 1881, L. Prang & Company, the leading printer and publisher of chromolithographs in the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century, held their second annual Christmas card design competition. The Symbolist artist Elihu Vedder won first prize for his painting of an allegorical figure set within an Art Nouveau-style border that features an excerpt from a poem by Celia Thaxter. Prang reproduced the painting as a multi-color lithograph and included Thaxter’s poem in full on the back, along with a caption declaring Vedder as the winner of a $1000 award for his design. The card is decorated with silk fringe and along its four edges, with two tassels hanging from the bottom corners and a no-longer existing string at the top, which would have allowed recipients of the card to hang it on the walls of their home or on their Christmas tree.

This fabric exemplifies the type of high-quality, finely textured silk of complex weave designed by Associated Artists in collaboration with Cheney Brothers, a silk weaving firm in Hartford, Connecticut (1838-1955). In it twill and plain weaves are combined, creating a compound woven textile called a lampas. This type of work is primarily associated with Asian weaving; perhaps Candace Wheeler (1827-1923) and the Cheneys used a sample of Japanese fabric as a model. Fine yarns of expensive reeled silk were employed, and the resulting fabric is extremely lustrous and delicate. Although many of the patterns designed by Associated Artists were treated principally from an artistic viewpoint, with the weave of the fabric of secondary concern, textiles such as this one relied heavily on sophisticated weaving techniques.

Abbey moved to England in 1878 to make illustrations for Harper's and settled there permanently in 1883. This image responds to an old ballad that celebrates drinking and the superiority of leather flasks. The artist shows haymakers at noon refreshing themselves with ale. Related stanzas read:

A leather bottèl we know is good,
Far better than glasses or cans of wood,
For when a man's at work in the field,
Your glasses and pots no comfort will yield;
But a good leather bottèl standing by
Will raise his spirits whenever he's dry.

At noon, the haymakers sit them down,
To drink from their bottèls of ale nut-brown;
In summer, too, when the weather is warm,
A good bottèl full will do them no harm.
Then the lads and lasses begin to tottle,
But what would they do without this bottèl?

Reproduced as a wood engraving, the image appeared in Harper's "New Montly Magazine," vol. 77 (August 1888), p. 326, and in "Old Songs, with drawings by E. A. Abbey and Alfred Parsons," New York, 1889, p. 45 (see MMA 21.36.112).

In their subject matter and compositional format, Perry’s watercolor paintings are quite similar to his oils, and his method of applying paint was consistently characterized by fastidious attention to detail. Like his colleague Eastman Johnson, Perry studied in Düsseldorf and Paris, where he acquired a respect for careful draftsmanship. He exhibited “A Month’s Darning” in 1876 at the American Society of Painters in Water Colors and later the same year at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, where it was acclaimed for its evocation of times past. The critic for the “New-York Tribune” found the woman’s head to be “the best part” of the composition and only regretted “that the sweet-faced girl . . . should have such large-footed men-folks to darn for.”

While the site in this watercolor cannot be identified, it was probably painted in Newport or Middletown, Rhode Island. The concentration on broad surface masses and the interplay of strong geometries reveal La Farge’s appreciation of Japanese design principles. The artist brought his exceptional gifts as a colorist to the portrayal of the clouds, sea, and sand—three apparently simple elements, each composed with a complex palette of subtle variegated colors.

This drawing for an unknown client incorporates many of the ideals of the American Aesthetic movement, which was at the height of its popularity from the mid-1870s to the mid-1880s: the use of flat patterns, exotic references, and shimmering surfaces. The decoration does not refer to a single culture but instead creates a dazzling fantasy of exotic opulence in keeping with the late-nineteenth-century worldview. The geometric leaded-glass window recalls those in the Veterans' Room at the Seventh Regiment Armory in New York, which Tiffany and Associated Artists decorated in 1880.

Helena de Kay is better known for her role as a cultural tastemaker in the late nineteenth-century New York art world than for her paintings, yet she was as committed to both pursuits. In addition to training formally at the National Academy of Design, she studied privately with Winslow Homer and John La Farge. Water Lilies—sketch-like in treatment while compositionally refined—reveals her indebtedness to La Farge’s flower still-lifes of the 1860s. A magnetic personality, de Kay (later Gilder) greatly enriched the progressive cultural landscape of late nineteenth-century New York through many contributions, including establishing the famous Friday salons at the Gilders’ home near Union Square, The Studio; organizing a Saturday-morning sketch club; and co-founding both the Art Students League and the Society of American Artists. Her leading presence was directly responsible for the large number of women involved in those organizations.

This lyrical and lively drawing was produced in preparation for Homer’s most ambitious experiment in decorative design—the Shepherd and Shepherdess fireplace surround (2003.140) in The Met’s collection. The highly detailed painting on ceramic tiles dates to the artist’s active involvement with the Tile Club, one of many New York artist organizations established in response to growing public interest in tilework and domestic design.

The drawing itself reveals the level of seriousness that Homer brought to his decorative work. In what may have begun as a rudimentary sketch, intended for transfer to a vertical grouping of three 8-inch square Minton tiles, Homer chose to elaborate his drawing with an unusual mix of black-and-white media, ultimately presenting it as a more finished work of art that he sold to a private collector a few years later. While the figure’s ‘old-fashioned’ dress suggests a storybook context, perhaps inspired by the popular illustrations of English Arts and Crafts artist Walter Crane, the vivid depiction of the male model appears to be grounded in Homer’s lived experience—specifically his recurring summer visits to the Catskills community of Houghton Farm, begun in 1876. Owned by Homer’s family friend and patron, Lawson Valentine, Houghton Farm, near Mountainville, New York, was known for its progressive experiments in sheep husbandry. Homer’s transformation of actual farm workers into dainty costumed figures—particularly a series of female ‘bo-peeps’—reveals a creative inventiveness and market savvy at a time when the artist was looking to increase his income with decorative projects. Homer exhibited many of these works—including The Met’s finished tile surround that he also copyrighted—in his regular venues, especially the American Watercolor Society annuals, and received positive reviews. One critic observed that these works were "more essentially and distinctively pastoral than anything that any American artist has yet attempted."