View from the Packet Wharf at Frenchtown Looking down Elk Creek

View from the Packet Wharf at Frenchtown Looking down Elk Creek

Benjamin Henry Latrobe

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

For most of his distinguished career as an architect, Latrobe, the designer of the original U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., kept an illustrated journal of his travels throughout the country. The journal, along with most of his watercolor drawings, is now in the Maryland Historical Society. This drawing depicts the confluence of Elk and Pates’s Creeks in northern Maryland, then a point of commercial and passenger exchange on the journey from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. For the most part, the lip service that the artist pays here to picturesque composition, manifested principally in the calligraphic tree in the foreground, yields to the artist’s curiosity about the landscape’s utilitarian, agricultural, and commercial functions.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

View from the Packet Wharf at Frenchtown Looking down Elk CreekView from the Packet Wharf at Frenchtown Looking down Elk CreekView from the Packet Wharf at Frenchtown Looking down Elk CreekView from the Packet Wharf at Frenchtown Looking down Elk CreekView from the Packet Wharf at Frenchtown Looking down Elk Creek

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.