The Old Bishop, Grand Manan Island, Canada

Frederic Edwin Church's pencil sketch captures a dramatic rock formation off the coast of Grand Manan Island in New Brunswick. Church, a leading figure of the Hudson River School, used such studies during his travels to gather material for finished paintings. The artist's confident linear technique—employing hatching and cross-hatching to model form and shadow—reveals his facility with landscape structure. This working drawing demonstrates the field methods nineteenth-century painters employed to document natural phenomena, translating geological formations into compositional elements for monumental studio works that would define American landscape painting.