Object Type: Work on Paper

Medium and Support: graphite on paper

Credit Line: Florence Griswold Museum; Museum purchase with partial gift from Mrs. Robert H. Krieble

Accession Number: 1993.18.6

Sketches of the Navajo Indians, including one of a Navajo boy. In 1993 the Museum acquired an extraordinary collection of seven sketchbooks and a diary belonging to Willard Metcalf. The sketchbooks date from 1875 to 1914. The diary dates to 1876. Three of the sketchbooks are from the early 1880s when Metcalf accompanied famed Smithsonian ethnologist Frank Hamilton Cushing to New Mexico to prepare illustrations for an article on the Zuni for "Harper's" magazine. Zuni customs, the faces of its people, and the landscape are recorded with penetrating on-the-spot detail. One sketchbook even shows his efforts to learn the difficult Zuni language. Each of these sketchbooks reveal much about the fieldwork of the artist, just as the diary suggests his personal thoughts. Together, they offer many clues to how Willard Metcalf observed the world around him.