The Metropolitan Museum began acquiring American drawings and watercolors in 1880, just ten years after its founding. Since then it has amassed more than 1,500 works executed by American artists during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in watercolor, pastel, chalk, ink, graphite, gouache, and charcoal. Roughly a third of the collection is by John Singer Sargent and was published as a single volume in 2000. …

This catalogue commemorates the first large loan exhibition of American decorative arts and pictures to be organized by the American Wing in many years. Among the well-remembered exhibitions of the past are the Hudson-Fulton Exhibition of 1909, the Girl Scout Loan Exhibition of 1929, the Loan Exhibition of New York State Furniture of 1984, and The Greek Revival in the United States of 1943. It is our hope that this current offering will be followed by many other shows, a hope supported by the generosity of The Friends of the American Wing. …

Known for the elegance and complexity of their decorative art, Marquesan artists were described by Paul Gauguin as possessing "an unheard of sense of decoration" in all they created. The extraordinary ways in which Marquesans adorned their world are reflected in virtually every type of object they made and used—from sacred figures of gods and ancestors to items that were purely functional. Long admired by artists, writers, and scholars, the art and culture of the Marquesas Islands have until recently been unfamiliar to larger audiences. …