Album of 29 presentation drawings of various types of carriages

Brewster & Co.

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This late-nineteenth-century album contains 29 colored presentation drawings of various carriage models from the firm Brewster & Co. They were bound in an album and send to a carriage manufacturer in Boston, Ferdinand F. French Carriage Company, who offered some of the Brewster & Co. carriages through his showroom. The album thus tells an important story about the nation-wide reach of the New York carriage manufacturing firm Brewster & Co. The drawings closely resemble other small presentation drawings by Brewster & Co. which are part of the Brewster & Co. carriage drawings archive, donated by the last owner of the business William Brewster

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.

Metropolitan Museum of Art