Panorama of New York and Vicinity
John Bachmann
An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art
Bachmann specialized in lithographed bird’s-eye views and here represents Manhattan from Hoboken, New Jersey. In the foreground, two baseball games are being played at the Elysian Fields—a site used by professional New York teams from 1845. Manhattan itself seems distorted, as though seen through a convex lens, which brings some elements into greater focus. Central Park’s southern edge is visible at left, and the Croton Distributing Reservoir’s two large tanks stand out above Fifth Avenue at Forty-Second Street. Pockets of green farther south represent Madison Square Park, Union Square, and City Hall Park, with the view extending down to Castle Garden on the Battery, then into New York Harbor, with Staten Island and the Narrows clearly delineated.
Drawings and Prints
An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.