Book excerpt: "The Metropolitan Museum began acquiring American drawings and watercolors in 1880, just ten years after its founding. Since then it has amassed more than 1,500 works executed by American artists during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in watercolor, pastel, chalk, ink, graphite, gouache, and charcoal. This volume documents the draftsmanship of more than 150 known artists before 1835 and that of about 60 unidentified artists of the period. It includes drawings and watercolors by such American masters as John Singleton Copley, John Trumbull, John Vanderlyn, Thomas Cole, Asher Brown Durand, George Inness, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Because the 504 works illustrate such a wide range of media, techniques, and styles, this publication is a veritable history of American drawing from the eighteenth through most of the nineteenth century."--Metropolitan Museum of Art website.