Harvard Art MuseumsHarvard Square, Cambridge
On Location: Drawing the Outdoors
A journey through drawings by groundbreaking 19th-century artists who left the studio to look outside for inspiration, showing how a close relationship with nature shaped artistic vision.
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A Claude glass is a small, dark, slightly convex mirror, and 18th-century tourists admired the landscape in it with their backs to the real view. Harvard's is in the show, among the drawings. Turning away from the scenery to look at it on a small dark screen is about two centuries older than the selfie.
Around it are about 140 sketches, watercolours and pastels by 19th-century Europeans, from Turner and Constable to Morisot, Cézanne and Van Gogh, in 10 sections laid out as trails. Look closely and you catch them working: Van Gogh pencilled "vert clair" (light green) into a field of The Blue Cart.
It is all on paper and much of it is small: Samuel Palmer's moonlit cornfield is under 11 cm wide. Entry is free, Tuesday to Sunday 10am to 5pm, in the Level 3 Special Exhibitions Gallery until 17 January 2027. Curator Joachim Homann leads free tours at noon on 12 December and 16 January, and the Bloomberg Connects app has curator audio.
Editor's pick
On Van Gogh's The Blue Cart you can still read a pencilled "vert clair", a colour note to himself. About 140 drawings made out of doors, from Constable's Brighton Beach to a Palmer cornfield on a card under 11 centimetres.
Look for
Van Gogh's The Blue Cart (1888)
A harvest scene at La Crau in pencil, chalk, ink, watercolour and gouache; look in the field at right for his barely visible pencilled note, "vert clair".
Constable's Brighton Beach (1824)
A horse turns a capstan on the shore in a watercolour about 26 cm wide, dated by Constable to 18 October 1824 and stuck onto a decorated album page.
Herschel's Menai Suspension Bridge (1827)
The bridge seen from the beach on the Anglesey side, traced in pencil with a camera lucida, with Herschel's note "eye 9 in" at the bottom.
Manet's Race Course at Longchamp (1864)
A watercolour of the Paris racecourse spread across two joined sheets, more than half a metre wide, signed "Manet 1864" at lower left.
Palmer's cornfield under a crescent moon (c. 1826-27)
A windmill and a church spire under a thin moon, in brown ink with touches of blue-green, on a card under 11 cm wide.
Good for
- Cheap Culture
- Going Solo
- Nerding Out
Skip if
You want big oil canvases: this is about 140 sketches, watercolours and pastels, many of them small.
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Image credits
5
- From Iran: A Visual TestimonyAzadeh Akhlaghi, via Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology
- Harvard Art Museumsajay_suresh via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
- Carpenter Center for the Visual ArtsBobak Ha'Eri via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0
- Peabody Museum of Archaeology & EthnologyDaderot, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain
- Harvard Museum of Natural Historyajay_suresh via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0