The DRWG/US (American artists) and DRWG1 (international artists) collections comprise more than 3,900 drawings, and include: unattributed British topographical drawings of the American Revolution; William Berryman’s depictions of the sugar cane plantations of early 19th-century Jamaica; John Ruben Smith’s and Michael Seymour’s landscapes of the United States in the decades immediately before and after photography was invented in 1839; and unattributed Russian drawings of China in the late 19th century. There are 20th century artists, too, including Howard Brodie’s drawings of Guadalcanal during World War II and his courtroom sketches for the 1969 trial of Senator Robert Kennedy’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan. There are also Reynold Weidenaar drawings of Washington, D.C. We have decided to consider silhouettes to be drawing with scissors, so there are a number of them in the collection as well. The collections are slowly growing as new acquisitions are added.

The real strength of the documentary drawing collection, however, are the nearly 1,900 drawings created during and after the American Civil War by such “special artists” as Alfred Waud and his brother, William Waud, Edwin Forbes, and Arthur Lumley, as well as soldier artist Adolph Metzner, and trained artists who documented their lives as soldiers, James Queen and Lieutenant William McIlvaine. See the “Civil War Drawings” page of this guide for more information.

DRWG/US Collection

Slightly more than 2,800 drawings of which nearly 2,700 are available for download anywhere in the world. Drawn by American artists, some of which became naturalized U.S. citizens, the earliest drawing dates to Boston Harbor in 1770 and the latest to the Sirhan Sirhan Trial in 1969.

DRWG 1 Collection

Nearly 1,200 drawings of which 180 have been reproduced for online access. Drawn primarily by European artists. There are a few works of art by Asian artists.

Particular Strengths

The DRWG/US and DRWG 1 collections are diverse in time period and topic, and many artists are represented by just one drawing. However, below is a list of artists and groups of drawings, in vaguely chronological order, who stand out in the collections, listed here. The inherent value of all of the drawings is that they document a moment in time and help us to understand the past. While all artists bring their own subjective view to their art, the intention here is to be accurate.

Library of Congress mural designs

The Library seeks to document its own creation, whenever possible, include preparatory drawings for the murals that grace the walls of the Jefferson Building. Acquired from a variety of sources.

• Kenyon Cox (1856-1919) (search result)
• Walter Shirlaw (1838-1909) (search result)
• Elihu Vedder (1836-1923) (search result)