Figure Sketches with a Skunk, East Hampton, New York

This page of sketches by Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church documents figure studies and animal observation from his time in East Hampton. The sheet combines careful drawings of standing and seated figures in contemporary dress with a detailed study of a skunk and smaller rodent. Church's methodical approach—capturing human posture and drapery alongside wildlife anatomy—reflects nineteenth-century artistic practice, where artists maintained sketchbooks as laboratories for composition and form. Such working pages reveal the empirical study underlying landscape and figural painting of the era.