Figure Sketches by the Surf, East Hampton, New York

Frederic Edwin Church's rapidly executed pen studies capture figures in motion along the beach—standing, walking, reclining, and shaded by parasols. These sketches reveal the artist's working method: quick notation of human posture and proportion, gesture and drapery. Church, a leading Hudson River School painter, populated his grand landscapes with such observed figures. The loose, economical line work preserves the immediacy of field study, showing how nineteenth-century landscape painters gathered visual reference for compositional work.