Woman Riding a Donkey

Frederic Edwin Church, the leading American landscape painter of the nineteenth century, sketched this figure study during his travels in the Middle East and Mediterranean. The economical pen line captures a moment of everyday life—a woman mounted on a donkey, her clothing rendered with quick, assured strokes. Church's sketchbooks document his visual research for larger compositions and reveal his attention to human figures within exotic settings. This drawing exemplifies the artist's practice of recording observed details that would inform his grand historical and orientalist paintings.