Library Guides: Manuscripts of Early National and Antebellum America: Drawings and Photographs

Drawings and Photographs

What follows is a descriptive list of drawing and photograph collections of the Early National and Antebellum eras, dating wholly or primarily from the years 1788 to 1860. Drawings and photographs associated with collections of textual manuscripts are described with those manuscripts, and are not included here.

The descriptions that follow may be linked to finding aids, which will provide readers with fuller information on that particular collection.

John Eatton Le Conte, Jr. Botanical Drawings, 1820s
42 drawings, in pencil, ink, and watercolor. The American naturalist John Eatton Le Conte, Jr. (1784-1860) was a New Jersey native who studied at Columbia College under David Hosack. Among his earlier botanical publications were papers on violets, bladderworts, and hedgehyssops, which appeared in the Annals of the Lyceum of the Natural History of New York in 1824-26. The 42 drawings in the present collection were prepared by Le Conte to illustrate these Lyceum papers, though as it happened they were never published. In 1897 the collection was acquired by the noted botanist Edward L. Greene (1843-1915). Each drawing is a life-size rendering by Le Conte of a North American species of the genera Viola (25), Utricularia (10), or Gratiola (7). Several are preliminary drawings, or uncolored or partly colored, but most are fully finished, in ink and watercolor over pencil. Many bear the penciled notations of Le Conte and/or of Greene. MSN/EA 9200-1 to MSN/EA 9200-50.