On the Harlem River (1855): Art, History and Details

On the Harlem River (1855) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is William Rickarby Miller (American, 1818–1893).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

When William Rickarby Miller arrived in America from England in 1845, he found watercolor painting in a dismal state—“a branch of Painting scarcely at all cultivated here.” Nonetheless, Miller made his living producing watercolors for print publications, depicting picturesque American woodlands with the staid British technique of his training. In On the Harlem River, Miller overlays delicate graphite line work with tints of luminous watercolor and dense gouache, capturing the color and light effects of a crisp autumn day. His meticulous transcription of individual leaves, branches, and stones displays his technical finesse, as well as his interest in documenting the particularities of nature. He shared this preoccupation with the Hudson River School, a mid-century American landscape painting movement whose members used detailed, on-site drawings of natural subjects as aids in making oil paintings. Miller’s great innovation was to marry the Hudson River manner to the medium of watercolor, anticipating the landscapes of American watercolorists in the decades to follow.

Object facts

• Title: On the Harlem River
• Date: 1855
• Creator attribution: William Rickarby Miller (American, 1818–1893)
• Culture: America
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: watercolor with gouache, over graphite, framing lines in graphite
• Dimensions: Sheet: 37.8 x 51.4 cm (14 7/8 x 20 1/4 in.)
• Collection: DR - American 19th Century
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1997.6

A detail from the museum

The tall trees at the center of Miller’s composition appear to be American sycamores, deciduous trees with creamy bark and spiky round fruit that grow in moist soil near streams and riverbanks.

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• The Cleveland Museum of Art, Annual Report 1997, September 25, 1998.
• Cleveland Museum of Art, Diane DeGrazia, and Carter E. Foster. Master Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art in association with Rizzoli International Publications, New York, 2000.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.