Geese Sketches with Figures, East Hampton, New York

Frederic Edwin Church's sheet of rapid observational sketches captures geese in various poses—swimming, wading, preening—alongside a standing figure wearing a hat and long dress. The varied angles and quick linework reveal an artist studying form and movement, a working method essential to Church's later monumental landscape paintings. These intimate field studies, executed in ink on paper, demonstrate how nineteenth-century painters built visual knowledge through direct observation, translating the specifics of nature into composed works.