New York Paintings and Sculpture

Paintings and Sculpture

The Museum of the City of New York's Paintings and Sculpture Collection includes more than 2500 works that depict New York and New Yorkers from the 17th century to the present.

Holdings include:

• Cityscapes by such renowned artists as Childe Hassam, Asher B. Durand, Jasper F. Cropsey, Ralph Blakelock, Reginald Marsh, and Franz Kline.

• Portraits of prominent New Yorkers, including works by Michiel van Mierevelt, John Wollaston, John Trumbull, Henry Inman, John Wesley Jarvis, Rembrandt Peale, and Samuel Lovett Waldo.  Subjects include George Washington in a work by Gilbert Stuart, Fiorello LaGuardia, Robert Moses, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Al Smith, Al Hirschfeld, and jazz greats John Coltrane and Miles Davis. An important group of 170 portrait miniatures augments the collection.

• Portrait busts and figural statues, with works by Thomas Crawford, Jo Davidson, Frederick MacMonnies, Hiram Powers, and Adolph Weinman. A small group of architectural bozzetti and preliminary models for monuments are among the institution's major treasures. These include Robert Ball Hughes's surviving plaster study for the ill-fated Hamilton monument destroyed by the Great Fire of 1835 and Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi's early terra-cotta model for the Statue of Liberty. 

To view selections from the Paintings Collection, visit the on-line edition of Painting the Town: Cityscapes of New York.

For more information about the Painting and Sculpture Collection, please contact Collections Access at research@mcny.org or call 212-534-1672 extension 3399.  For more information on the Museum's research policies, click here

For information about reproducing material from the collection, please visit Rights & Reproductions

On the previous page: Three White Tanks, 1993 [detail]; Stephen J. Dolmatch (born 1956); Gouache on paper, 14 ½ x 28 inches; Gift of the artist, 95.142