George Harvey’s Anglo American atmospheric landscapes

The Magazine ANTIQUES | October 2008

The English-born artist George Harvey is primarily remembered for his spectacular watercolor landscapes, although he was also a painter in oils, a miniaturist, architect, poet, and writer. In the 1830s and early 1840s he created a series of forty “atmospherical” watercolor views of American scenery that he intended to have engraved and sold serially by subscription, a project he hoped would foster a better understanding between England and the United States. Over the course of two decades, he promoted it on both sides of the Atlantic with published commentaries and magic lantern shows, in a flirtation between art, science, optics, and popular spectacle.

While his artistic training remains unknown, he may be the G. Harvey who exhibited the still life Flowers at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1819.¹ After immigrating to the United States in 1820, Harvey spent two years traveling and sketching in Ohio and Michigan, on the frontier, and in Canada. By 1827 he had established residence in Brooklyn. The following year he made his debut at the National Academy of Design² and was elected an associate member; and in 1829 he moved to Boston. After traveling to England in 1830 or 1831 to study, he was back in Boston in 1833, but by 1834 overwork had weakened his health. On medical advice to spend time outdoors, he purchased twenty acres in what is now Hastings-on-Hudson in Westchester County, New York.³ On this estate he built a rustic cottage called Woodbank and designed its gardens, relating: “These exercises in the open air, led me…to notice and study the ever-varying atmospheric effects of this beautiful climate. I undertook to illustrate them by my pencil, and thus, almost, commenced a set of Atmospherical Landscapes.”⁴

By 1836 Harvey had engaged another Anglo-American artist William James Bennett to engrave the views for his series. The writer Washington Irving (1783–1859), who was Harvey’s neighbor and whose house, Sunnyside in Tarrytown, he helped redesign, was to edit the text. After issuing a prospectus,⁵ Harvey published the first installment in 1841 as Harvey’s Scenes of the Primitive Forest of America, at the Four Periods of the Year. Bennett’s four hand-colored aquatints of the seasons based on Harvey’s watercolors told a wilderness story of seasonal pioneer labors against the backdrop of gigantic first-growth forests (Figs. 1, 2) enhanced by Harvey’s text. Few copies are known, but it seems that the American edition included an illustrated frontispiece that was intended to be the title page for the entire series, Harvey’s American Scenery, representing different atmospheric effects at different times of day, while the English edition did not.⁶ Harvey planned to follow this quartet of the “Epochs of the Year” with thirty-five horizontally oriented “Different Epochs of the Day.” In his forty preparatory watercolors (including the one for the frontispiece/title page),⁷ he combined documentary and scientific observation of climate and atmosphere with emblematic weather iconography and poetic manipulation, creating the only series of American watercolors devoted to geographical regions observed at specific times of day and under particular weather conditions. However, they also harbored contemporary spiritual and moral ideas—like those of the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) in his Cosmos (English ed., 1845)—that weather and climate affected the moral and intellectual development of a people. Harvey also implied that the distinctive climate of North America was an indication of divine providence.⁸ In painting the scenes he employed traits derived from British watercolor and miniature traditions, most notably a dazzling stipple technique foreshadowing the American Pre-Raphaelites, which Harvey may well have seen in the work of English watercolorists such as Robert Hills (1769–1844). Eighteen of the thirty known watercolors for the series are now in the New-York Historical Society,⁹ the largest repository of Harvey’s work. (The museum has twenty-seven watercolors, six oils, and four portrait miniatures,¹⁰ while the library holds a copy of the English edition of Harvey’s Scenes.)

Explaining the genesis of his project in terms of history painting, Harvey noted his aspirations to portray the history of the day, thereby linking it to the genre epitomized by Thomas Cole’s “Course of Empire,” which charts the rise and fall of a nation-state in the diurnal cycle. By contrast, Harvey’s message was optimistic and republican, celebrating progress through settlement, cultivation, development, the rise of technology, and the use of natural resources from Virginia to Canada. Instead of a geographically organized tour of American sites, he arranged his scenes in an episodic progression through a single day interspersed with seasonal and meteorological variations.¹¹ As he noted on the back cover of Harvey’s Scenes, his approach reflected the transatlantic vogue for dioramas and panoramas.

In 1837 Harvey leased a studio in the old New York University Building, where his neighbor and mentor was his friend Samuel F. B. Morse (1791–1872). Known later as an inventor, Morse may have encouraged Harvey’s interests in scientific methods. Morse was also the first president of the National Academy, where, also in 1837, Harvey exhibited nine landscapes that were either early versions of the atmospheric landscapes or the final works with preliminary titles.¹²

By 1838, when Harvey again left for Europe to garner subscribers and market his series, he had completed twenty-two watercolors. After returning to the United States in 1840, he continued to seek subscribers and exhibited the landscapes in New York and Boston. He also solicited endorsement letters from prominent artists—Morse in New York, Washington Allston (1779–1843) in Boston, and Thomas Sully (1783–1872) in Philadelphia. By 1841 Bennett’s aquatints—the plates for which could only produce about 250 good impressions—had been issued.¹³ Harvey colored one set and, unable to locate accomplished colorists in this country, turned for assistance to his London co-publisher, the Ackermann firm.¹⁴ Reflecting his interest in perception and optics, he published an article about oceanic phosphorescence,¹⁵ but remained frustrated in his efforts to attract subscribers. In 1842 he exhibited at the National Academy oil paintings of the seasons (for sale) and their watercolor models (not for sale).¹⁶ That same year he also showed, at the fair held by the American Institute of the City of New York, where Morse exhibited his “Electro Magnetic Telegraph,” “One Set of Atmospheric Views [the seasons], bound in ordinary manner. One [set] framed. One [set] retouched by himself. One [set] bound in morocco, entirely coloured by himself.”¹⁷ The following year his one-person retrospective at 322 Broadway, home of the American Art-Union and the Apollo Association, marked the first time he exhibited the atmospheric landscapes as a group.¹⁸ In 1844 he showed at the Boston Athenaeum, including watercolors of the seasons and thirty-five times of day subjects (not for sale). Underlining the organic evolution of his series and the dominance of atmospheric effects over locations, he described one thusly: “Subsiding Storm. Mountain Scene, this is merely the study of the intended effect. The locality of the view is not yet decided upon.”¹⁹

The “Epochs of the Day” were horizontal compositions in which Harvey used diagonals to propel the series forward, as in a moving panorama. He arranged them from daybreak to midnight, interspersed with subjects of meteorological conditions or the seasons. For the initial scene of daybreak with its pioneer setting (Fig. 3), he illustrated a passage from James Fenimore Cooper’s (1789–1851) novel The Prairie (1827), his only reliance on literature. Drawn from the third of “The Leather-Stocking Tales,” it contrasts the blazing fires with a hint of light on the horizon. For the subsequent sunrise view of Flatbush from Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, Harvey used a reciprocal diagonal (Fig. 4). Highlighting the ephemeral meteorology, he scratched out the breath of a cow hitting the chilly air, and, underlining the sublimity of the view, he represented the Reformed Dutch Church of Flatbush, which still stands, in the distance. “The present view is at sunrise, typical of our Christian hopes, for the sunrise of the soul is at the boundary of life,” he wrote.²⁰ After two additional morning scenes he inserted meteorological views and cloud scenes (see Fig. 6), followed by an Indian summer episode with a railroad and then five types of storms, including the view in Figure 8. In that technically sophisticated watercolor, where Canadian settlers make maple syrup, Harvey created heavy wet snow­­­flakes and fog by man­­­­ipulating the gouache and the paper’s reserve as well as by scraping small abrasions into the paper. In a tour de force of synesthesia, he communicated the frigid temperatures and humid air of late winter experienced by the boy collecting sap.

Among Harvey’s six afternoon vignettes are views of the Erie Canal, Niagara Falls, the Potomac River, Jersey City near sunset, and his Westchester property facing the Palisades (Fig. 5). The early date of the last derives from its similarity to an oil painting signed and dated 1836 that depicts a location upriver and the fact that Harvey exhibited three such subjects at the National Academy in 1837.²¹ By scraping the surface of the paper at the far left and stippling orange gouache on the reserve, he conveyed the sun’s reflections on the river. In another afternoon scene (Fig. 7), set on Boston Common with the Massachusetts State House of Charles Bullfinch (1763–1844), he recorded a rare double rainbow, one of nature’s most spectacular meteorological events. Harvey’s interest in rainbows can be linked to the English artist John Constable (1776–1837) who, like Harvey, showed at the Royal Academy in 1832.²² Constable had studied rainbows seriously by 1812, and also painted double ones.²³ Unlike Constable, Harvey did not accurately represent the color sequence of the secondary bow reversed from that of the primary. However, the symbolism of the rainbow—hope and reconciliation—did not escape him in the Boston scene, the most allegorical of his series, where it signifies divine approval of the nation’s progress in the afternoon of its life.²⁴

With scientific documentation, technological observations, and picturesque effects, Harvey captured the day fading into evening in five stages. The first takes place on the waterways of Pennsylvania’s extensive network of canals in the Allegheny Mountains (Fig. 9), and the second where two Finger Lakes, Cayuga and Seneca, intersect with the Erie Canal as the sun slips below the horizon (Fig. 10). In the third twilight scene (Fig. 12) his vantage point across the river from bustling Catskill Landing enabled him to focus on the transparent atmosphere and hazy lavender of the distant mountains. The view is punctuated by the silhouette of a dead tree suggesting nature’s cycle in a mood reminiscent of the German romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich (1771–1820).²⁵ The fourth evening scene (Fig. 11) shows the meteorological bow (bands of colored light) beyond the lighthouses on the Navesink Highlands, which Harvey claimed, “Professor Morse” had pointed out.²⁶ The twin lights had stood sentinel over the treacherous coastal waters of northern New Jersey since 1828 and were the primary lights for New York harbor. Exploiting this breathtaking site for twilight, one of the subtlest times of day, Harvey suggests by his technique the mist characteristic of the hour. Since the lights were rebuilt in 1862, his watercolor preserves not only this transient moment but also the earlier maritime monuments. By contrast, Harvey’s nightfall showcases a fairly new technology, gaslight illuminating Broadway in front of Saint Thomas’s Church in New York (Museum of the City of New York).²⁷

Harvey closed the series with a pair of nocturnes lit by astronomical phenomena. In the first with a waning gibbous moon and stars (Fig. 13), three hunters warming themselves by a fire are alarmed by the sound of a stampede of bison; the silhouetted leafless tree adds a picturesque note to this composition reminiscent of the English artist Samuel Palmer (1805–1881) and foreshadows the end of the frontier. In the final view, Midnight. Aurora Borealis, Fishing by Torchlight (whereabouts unknown), artificial illumination competes with celestial fireworks.Despite critical success, Harvey struggled in vain for another decade to bring the project to fruition, even selling his Westchester property in 1846 to secure funds. After learning about the more than two thousand literary and scientific societies in Great Britain, and having attended illustrated popular lectures at the Polytechnic Institute of London, he began marketing the atmospheric landscapes by lecturing.²⁸ John Barlow, secretary of the Royal Institution of Great Britain for the Dissemination of Useful Knowledge, invited him to deliver eight lectures there “On the Discovery, Resources and Progresses of North America,” illustrated by lantern slides.²⁹ To that end Harvey converted his watercolor images into hand-painted glass slides that were projected to sixteen by eighteen feet by a magic lantern—a technology that also enabled him to redress earlier criticism about the intimate size of his watercolors.³⁰

The magic lantern, known for centuries, consisted of an oil lamp, a lens, and images on glass plates. Newly perfected machines, first with two and then three lenses, allowed pictures to be dissolved and changed more rapidly, and the mid-century invention of the oxy-hydrogen limelight further revolutionized the medium. Called the Drummond Lamp after the Scottish engineer Lieutenant Thomas Drummond (1797–1840), it eliminated flickering candles and malodorous oil burners, and Harvey advertised his use of this novel technology in his pamphlets.

Little is known about the anonymous painters of magic lanterns slides.³¹ Harvey may have obtained his painters through the successors to Rudolph Ackermann (1764–1834), who had been involved in related backlit paintings called transparencies as early as 1799, the year he published Instructions for Painting Transparencies. It was only a short jump to the moveable lantern slides Harvey used in his lectures. In 1971 Kennedy Galleries in New York had four of Harvey’s slides, at least three after atmospheric landscapes: two (currently untraced) copied watercolors now in the New-York Historical Society, Indian Summer—Grist Mill on the Frederictown Railroad, Maryland and the one in Figure 9.³² The others depicted Niagara Falls (Fig. 14)³³ and Winter—Impeded Travellers in a Pine Forest, Upper Canada (private collection).³⁴

Harvey’s lectures about his landscapes were so popular that he repeated them in two series of six lectures each at the London Institution and at 22 Russell Place, Fitzroy Square,³⁵ and he also toured in cities like Coventry, Lynn, Birmingham, and Cambridge. With the slides, Harvey positioned his art in the popular sphere with a nod to science, optics, and technology, eventually precipitating a notice to his subscribers in November 1850 that he was canceling publication of Harvey’s Scenes.³⁶

Later in 1850 Harvey established his own hall, grandly designated in a souvenir booklet as Harvey’s Royal Gallery of Illustration. Here he presented nightly lectures with slides for the cost of a shilling, exhibited watercolors (thirty-seven of the original atmospheric landscapes, including the seasons) and oil paintings, and offered Bennett’s aquatints for sale. In the booklet Harvey commented that he engaged “artists and opticians” to paint his slides,³⁷ and the 1850 Bulletin of the American Art-Union reported that they were “superior to that class of painting in general.”³⁸

Claiming that ill health forced him to close the London gallery soon after it opened, Harvey returned to the United States and revised his lectures in 1851 for an American audience, introducing diverse themes outlined in two pamphlets.³⁹ The first begins with a map, a discussion of climate, and images of the seasons.⁴⁰ The second, which describes new and recycled scenes, stresses American history, commencing with slides of the Mayflower and of the Pilgrims landing. Harvey’s poetic text, which resembles voice-overs in documentary films, refers to the dissolving views of magic lanterns, like one related to Figure 8: “to make the illustration more veritable, a dioramic effect in the picture is now taking place, the deepening gloom betokens a storm,—see, snow begins to fall.”⁴¹ While Harvey had asserted that his atmospheric landscapes were based on empirical observations of sky, climate, and light, by 1850 he was articulating a more scientific orientation. In Royal Gallery of Illustration, he wrote that the views were informed by the pioneering Linnean classification of clouds formulated by the English chemist and meteorologist Luke Howard (1772–1864), first posited in 1803 and accepted to this day.⁴² Howard’s work paralleled the visual studies of Constable. Harvey’s debt to Howard finds reflection in his use of Howard’s nomenclature, as in Figure 6, and it also surfaces in Figure 11, where he depicted Howard’s three layers of atmosphere (mists, cumulus clouds, and cirrus clouds). Howard and Harvey were also connected by geography; after 1812 Howard had moved to Tottenham, Harvey’s city of birth and burial, and sometime between 1857 and 1866 Harvey sold the atmospheric landscapes to his son, John Eliot Howard (1807–1883), who eventually dispersed them.⁴³

Details of Harvey’s life after 1850 are scarce. After advertising his glass slides in the Boston Transcript (March 22, 1851) and the New York Evening Post (April 7, 1851), he leased his show to the young Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902), who presented Harvey’s “Dissolving Views” of American scenery and sold his pamphlets to audiences in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and Providence, Rhode Island.⁴⁴ By 1857 Harvey was back in London, although he continued to cross the Atlantic during the 1860s and 1870s, including visiting Florida and Bermuda. In 1871 he attempted unsuccessfully to publish chromolithographs after his watercolors of Newport, and in 1876 he published The Sires and Sons from Albion Sprung, an illustrated book of poetry and plays, in London under the nom de plume George St. George. None of these ventures were as positively received as the atmospheric landscapes, Harvey’s most significant contribution in a career paradigmatic of the challenges artists faced in marketing two-dimensional works and the effects technology exerted on them.

Two of the atmospheric landscapes are included in the exhibition Drawn by New York: Six Centuries of Watercolors and Drawings at the New-York Historical Society, at the historical society until January 7, 2009, and thirteen others are on view in the Luce Center on the fourth floor through November. The exhibition travels to the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, and to the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati starting next summer.

A special thanks to Stephen R. Edidin, curator of American and European art at the New-York Historical Society, for sharing his files on Harvey. I am also most grateful to: Kevin J. Avery, associate curator in the Department of American Painting and Sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Deborah McCracken Rebuck, curator of the Dietrich American Foundation, Chester Springs, Pennsylvania; and Christine Huber, assistant curator of exhibitions, Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill, North Carolina; as well as Alexandra Mazzitelli, research associate at the New-York Historical Society.

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¹ Algernon Graves, The Royal Academy of Arts: A Complete Dictionary of Contributors…(Henry Graves, London, 1906), vol. 4, p. 17, no. 169. ² Mary Bartlett Cowdrey, National Academy of Design Exhibition Record, 1826–1860 (New-York Historical Society, New York, 1943), vol. 1, p. 213. ³ David Willis McCullough, “George Harvey Boumeester from Hastings,” Hastings Historian, vol. 25, no. 4 (Fall 1995), pp. 1–6. ⁴ George Harvey, Harvey’s Scenes of the Primitive Forest of America… (George Harvey and Messrs. Ackermann, London, 1841), preface. It was published under the patronage of Queen Victoria (r. 1837–1901). ⁵ George Harvey, Colored Engravings of American Scenery: Proposals for Publishing…, broadside, Print Room, New York Public Library, New York. The first three pages contain Harvey’s New York address; the final page, dated September 9, 1841, in London, explains that, due to a lack of good colorists, the first part would be “put forth complete in itself,” the remaining scenes depending on subscribers. ⁶ For the English edition, see n. 4; the American edition was printed by Charles Vinton, New York. For the frontispiece/title page in the American edition, see Gloria Gilda Deák, Picturing America, 1497–1899… (Princeton University Press, Princeton, N. J., 1988), vol. 1, pp. 315–316, and vol. 2, Fig. 468. ⁷ For the latter, see Jo Miller, Drawings of the Hudson River School, 1825–1875 (Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, N.Y., 1969), p. 120, No. 72. ⁸ Harvey articulated his philosophy earlier, but he published it referring to Humboldt in George Harvey, Harvey’s Illustrations of the Forest Wilds and Uncultivated Wastes of Our Country… (Boston, 1851), pp. 7–8. ⁹ Donald A. Shelley, “George Harvey and His Atmospheric Landscapes of North America,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 2 (1948), pp. 104–113; Shelley, “George Harvey, English Painter of Atmospheric Landscapes in America,” American Collector, vol. 17, no. 3 (April 1948), pp. 10–13. ¹⁰ Richard J. Koke, American Landscape and Genre Paintings in The New-York Historical Society (New-York Historical Society in association with G. K. Hall and Company, Boston, 1982), vol. 2, pp. 94–113. ¹¹ Stephen R. Edidin, “George Harvey: An Interpretation Based on His Watercolors,” 1977 (private collection), p. 5, suggests that the Reverend William Gilpin (1724–1804), an advocate of picturesque beauty, may have provided the framework for Harvey in his Last Work Published of the Rev. William Gilpin, known as Gilpin’s Day (London, 1810, republished 1824). ¹² Cowdrey, National Academy, vol. 1, p. 214. ¹³ George Harvey to the Apollo Association, September 5, 1843, BV, American Art-Union, manuscript division, New-York Historical Society Library. ¹⁴ George Harvey, “Liberty Tree Building, 380 Washington Street, Boston, Nov. 1850,” printed flyer; copy in Boston Athenaeum library. ¹⁵ “Phosphoresence of the Ocean,” Knickerbocker, vol. 18, no. 2 (1841), pp. 162–163. ¹⁶ Cowdrey, National Academy, vol. 1, pp. 214–215. ¹⁷ American Institute of the City of New York, Catalogue Containing a Correct List of Every Article Exhibiting at the Fifteenth Annual Fair of the American Institute… (New York, 1842), p. 4, No. 161; copy in New-York Historical Society, Morse is cited on p. 1, No. 20. ¹⁸ George Harvey, An Index to the Original Water Color Drawings and Oil Paintings, Executed by Mr. Harvey, and Now Exhibiting for a Short Time at No. 322 Broadway… (New York, 1843), copy in Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, library. ¹⁹ The Boston Athenaeum Art Exhibition Index: 1827–1874, comp. and ed. Robert F. Perkins Jr. and William J. Gavin III (Library of the Boston Athenaeum, Boston, 1980), p. 73, No. 25. ²⁰ George Harvey, Harvey’s Illustrations of Our Country, an Outline of Its Social Progress, Political Development, and Material Resources… (Boston, 1851), p. 27. ²¹ For the 1836 oil, see Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings, 1815 to 1865 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1949), pp. 298–299, No. 132. For the National Academy, see Cowdrey, National Academy, vol. 1, p. 214. ²² Graves, Royal Academy of Arts, vol. 2, p. 124; vol. 4, p. 17. ²³ John E. Thornes, John Constable’s Skies: A Fusion of Art and Science (University of Birmingham Press, Birmingham, 1999), especially, pp. 46–47, 81–88, 141–147. ²⁴ Christine Jones Huber, “George Harvey’s Atmospheric Landscapes: Picturesque, Scientific, and Historic American Scenes” (master’s thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1989), pp. 88–91. ²⁵ A variant, Hudson River from Osborne (Historic Hudson Valley, Tarrytown, New York), is illustrated in Miller, Drawings of the Hudson River School, p. 120, No. 71. ²⁶ George Harvey, Harvey’s Royal Gallery of Illustration, Next Door to the Haymarket Theatre. A Descriptive Pamphlet of the Original Drawings of American Scenery, Under Various Atmospheric Effects… (London, 1850), p. 27; copy is in Historic Hudson Valley, Tarrytown, New York. ²⁷ Painting the Town: Cityscapes of New York, ed.Jan Seidler Ramirez (Museum of the City of New York in association with Yale University Press, New Haven, 2000), pp. 88–89, No. 9. ²⁸ Harvey, “Liberty Tree Building.” ²⁹ George Harvey, Syllabus of a Course of Eight Lectures, by George Harvey, Esq., On the Discovery, Resources and Progress of North America, (North of Virginia); Illustrated by More than Sixty Pictorial Views, Illuminated by the Oxy-hydrogen Lime Light (Royal Institution of Great Britain, London, March 1849); copy in the library of the Boston Athenaeum. ³⁰ George Harvey, “A Few Hints on the Philosophy of Size in Its Relation to the Fine Arts,” Knickerbocker, vol. 23, no. 2 (1844), pp. 156–159. ³¹ Olive Tooley, “A Print-Colourer’s Art: The Work of William Mason (1809–1875),” Country Life, vol. 164 (October 19, 1978), pp. 1174–1175. ³² For the lantern slide, see Fine American Furniture, Silver, Folk Art and Primitive Arts, Christie’s, New York, October 19, 1990, lot 141. ³³ The title of the slide is listed in Harvey, Harvey’s Illustrations of the Forest Wilds, p. 23. It is unclear whether it was the view of Niagara from the Canadian side that was part of his atmospheric landscapes. His more general view of the falls from the Canadian side (Brilliant Afternoon) is listed in his Harvey’s Royal Gallery of Illustration, pp. 24–25, No. 28. ³⁴ Deborah Rebuck to Kevin Avery, February 11, 1991, personal correspondence. ³⁵ Harvey issued a separate announcement for each of these series in 1849, each with different contents but both titled (with variations), Syllabus of a Course of Six Lectures…On the History, Resources, and Scenery of North America… illuminated by the Oxy-hydrogen Lime-Light. The first was published by the London Institution; no publisher is given for the second. Copies of both are in the library of the Boston Athenaeum. ³⁶ Harvey, “Liberty Tree Building.” ³⁷ Harvey, Harvey’s Royal Gallery of Illustration, pp. 8–9. ³⁸ Bulletin of the American Art-Union, series for 1850, no. 3, p. 47. ³⁹ Harvey, Harvey’s Illustrations of the Forest Wilds, and Harvey, Harvey’s Illustrations of Our Country. ⁴⁰ Harvey, Harvey’s Illustrations of the Forest Wilds, p. 7. ⁴¹ Harvey, Harvey’s Illustrations of Our Country, p. 13. ⁴² Harvey, Harvey’s Royal Gallery of Illustration, p. 13. For Howard, see Thornes, John Constable’s Skies, especially pp. 188–191. ⁴³ Huber, “George Harvey’s Atmospheric Landscapes,” pp. 5, 52–53. A letter from Harvey to John Eliot Howard on September 27, 1866, begins: “As you have the original drawings of my once contemplated work on America,” transcript by Barbara N. Parker, files of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. ⁴⁴ Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (Brooklyn Museum and Hudson Hills Press, New York, 1990), pp. 23, 25, 116. Thanks to Kevin J. Avery for the reference in the New York Evening Post.

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ROBERTA J. M. OLSEN is curator of drawings at the New-York Historical Society.

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