CoastLines: American Prints and Drawings

 Clark Art Institute

 July 4 through September 27, 2026

More than a landscape, the coastline is a site of labor, leisure, and national history. As the margin where the United States meets the Atlantic Ocean, the nation’s Eastern coastline has fostered vital encounters where artists, coastal culture, and the natural world converge. CoastLines: American Prints and Drawings draws almost entirely from the Clark’s collection, bringing together a vast range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century representations of life along the shore. The exhibition is on view in the Eugene V. Thaw Gallery for Works on Paper in the Clark’s Manton Research Center from July 4 through September 27, 2026.  

“This exhibition invites visitors to reconsider the American coastline not simply as a geographic boundary but as a dynamic space shaped by commerce, migration, and tourism,” said Esther Bell, incoming Hardymon Director of the Clark Art Institute.

Hannah Chew, a member of the Class of 2026 in the Williams College/Clark Graduate Program in the History of Art, curated the exhibition under the direction of Anne Leonard, the Clark’s Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs.

“Coinciding with the American semi-quincentennial, CoastLines encourages viewers to consider how the coastal landscape and its communities have shaped American culture and history over the last two centuries,” said exhibition curator Hannah Chew.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Focused on works by American artists depicting the Eastern Coast of the United States and their sojourns across the Atlantic, this exhibition explores the coastline as a site of contact and exchange, the stage for economic and cultural activity, and a terrain rich in American mythology.

These artistic representations of the coastline reveal the contradictions and complications of American identity. The Eastern seaboard holds a layered national history: from ports that participated in the transatlantic slave trade to the development of the nation’s early economy to the later emergence of leisure tourism and wilderness preservation. American artists along the coast grappled with these tensions, and their artistic experiments at the edge of the Atlantic created a distinctive national style with international influences, while drawing inspiration from both sensational popular media and lofty notions of the sublime.

CoastLines: American Prints and Drawings is organized by the Clark Art Institute and curated by Hannah Chew, Class of 2026, Williams College/Clark Graduate Program in the History of Art.

LABOR AND LEISURE

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the coastline offered economic opportunity as a site of trade, industry, and communication in the growing young nation. As more people moved to and lived along the shore, communities dependent on the sea developed unique cultures and relationships to the coastline that were shaped by the ocean’s power and unpredictability. Access to the Atlantic Ocean also made the coastline a destination for leisure. Over the last few decades of the nineteenth century, America’s tourism industry grew rapidly, and seaside resorts, recreational fishing, and beaches drew visitors seeking beauty and escape. Consequently, these dual modes of interaction—work and play—coexisted along the shore. American artists, inspired by both the intensity of maritime labor and the sublime landscape, often occupied a space between these two extremes: they settled in artist colonies, traveled widely, and worked enthusiastically.

Winslow Homer (American, 1836–1910) captures the thrilling sportsmanship of fishing through a striking reversal of scale in A Good Pool, Saguenay River (1895). The hooked ouananiche, or landlocked salmon, fills the foreground, while the fishermen and their canoe navigate choppy waters in the distance. The dramatic composition recalls illustrations in popular sporting magazines, emphasizing the thrill and spectacle of the catch.

In the watercolor The Eagle’s Nest (1902), Homer depicts the awe and excitement of two outdoorsmen rushing to glimpse a pair of eagles soaring above their nest. As industrialization transformed the American landscape, city dwellers sought escape in the wilderness. Scenes like this one reflect the growing popularity of amateur naturalist pursuits that arose out of these trends. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, the nature tourism industry had expanded dramatically, often at the expense of both the ecosystems and the Indigenous communities that inhabited waterways.

STORM AND STORY

In 1881, Homer took a trip to Cullercoats on the coast of England’s North Sea, where he witnessed the dramatic search and rescue operation following the shipwreck of the Iron Crown. The heroic efforts of the town’s lifesaving brigade would inspire some of his most successful work over the next decade. After his stay in England, the artist returned to the East Coast of the United States in search of more sea rescues.

Life Line (1884, probably printed c. 1940) was Homer’s first published etching, translating into ink the artist’s extremely successful 1884 oil painting of the same name. Suspended between storm and raging sea, a rescuer in a device called a breeches buoy clutches a woman as an unseen crew hauls them to the shore. Neither the wrecked ship nor the coastline is visible in Homer’s composition, heightening the sense of drama in the confrontation between human and sea.

Homer completed the etching Saved (1889) a few years after finishing the Life Line print, copying and reworking elements from his paintings. While the Life Line etching attempted to faithfully reproduce the original painting, Saved is a far more experimental and creative reinterpretation.

Homer’s illustrations of shipwrecks were featured in newspapers and periodicals, feeding a growing public appetite for sensational scenes of danger, loss, and survival at sea. The scenes also became the basis for some of Homer’s most revered paintings, like Undertow (1886), on view in the Clark’s permanent collection galleries.

INTERNATIONAL EXCHANGE

Throughout the nineteenth century, American artists often looked to French and British academic painters and critics for inspiration. Academic art instruction in the United States was only beginning to emerge, so many young artists sought training abroad, especially in Paris, where studios and academies provided crucial technical instruction. Meanwhile, the written work of British and French art critics, such as writer and artist John Ruskin (English, 1819–1900), circulated internationally and shaped artistic standards and ideas about the role of art in society.

Few artists or scholars shaped the education of American painters as profoundly as Ruskin. His writings—on drawing technique, on Venice, and on the painter J. M. W. Turner (English, 1775–1851)—were widely read by American artists, including many featured in the exhibition. Ruskin was also a skilled draftsman and painter. His watercolor 

Sunset over the Mountains (c. 1845) is likely a page from one of his sketchbooks where he took notes while working out a composition.

Traveling artists often brought with them easy-to-transport sketchbooks and watercolor materials, producing drawings that could be brought back and further developed in their studios. Upon their return, American artists adapted their European lessons to American subjects and settings, exploring new inspirations that shaped the course of American art.

Thomas Moran (American, 1837–1926), who greatly admired J. M. W. Turner and John Ruskin, followed in their footsteps to Venice, which he declared “an inexhaustible mine of pictorial treasures.”

 

In View of Venice (1887), Moran explored the subtleties of opaque watercolor and Ruskinian techniques of drawing.

VESSELS AND VOYAGES

Portraits of maritime vessels and pictorial inventories of ports were popular subjects in early American art, and in the nineteenth century, ships also often took on a symbolic resonance. Representations of seafaring vessels carried layered meanings: they evoked naval power, technological ingenuity, far-reaching exploration, and growing networks of global commerce. Ships served as cultural, political, and economic intermediaries between Americans, their natural environment, and the global community. While some artists and writers chose shipwreck narratives to illustrate the dramatic conflict between man and sea, others instead employed the rich iconography of maritime culture to symbolize personal journeys or broader narratives of national progress.

In 1930, Rockwell Kent (American, 1882–1971) published N by E, a novel that follows the artist’s 1929 voyage from New York harbor to Greenland. Kent documented his journey with striking illustrations and playful prose, detailing the perils of sailing, as well as his shipwreck and eventual rescue in Greenland. As stories of ambitious adventurers and dangerous voyages surged in popularity, Kent positioned himself as both a seasoned explorer and an innovative artist.

 

His 1930 illustration Close Hauled refers to the position of a boat oriented closely to the wind direction, allowing the vessel to move upwind.

Beyond artistic exchange, ships and seafaring images also register the United States’ transatlantic and global encounters. American vessels carried goods, people, and capital across the Atlantic, and seafaring was central to commerce, diplomacy, and imperial ambition. Ships and the routes they traveled gesture toward the economic ambition and political claims that linked the United States to the rest of the world.