Two centuries without color — Gilded Age portraits, early press photography, ink wash, and modern grayscale wildlife and coastline. Light and shadow carry the whole picture.
The older work is mostly documentary: William Henry Bartlett’s engravings of Irish abbeys and the Hudson River, Robert Batty’s Edinburgh from 1832, Edward S. Curtis at Canyon de Chelly, Civil War battle scenes from Gettysburg and Wilson’s Creek, the Panama Canal under construction, and golfers on the links at St Andrews. Henry Reuterdahl’s RMS Titanic and Edgar Etherington’s Kraken bring the sea in at its most dramatic.
The contemporary side trades history for contrast: a lion head and a tiger in ink wash, a sea turtle, hoodoo rock formations and the Anza-Borrego badlands, breaking waves, and graffiti lettering and dripping crowns for a harder edge. Monochrome sits easily in almost any room, and it pairs well with a gallery wall of mixed frames.
