Prints & Drawings

The Peabody Museum cares for a collection of prints and drawings comprising over 1500 items. They consist of work by Indigenous artists, representations of Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures collected or created by anthropologists, and depictions of archaeological sites and artifacts. The majority of the collections are from the Americas, but significant pieces from Africa, Asia and Australia highlight the Museum’s historical interest and engagement with communities across the globe. Formats include watercolors and pencil and pen and ink drawings, as well as pastels, dry points, etchings, engravings, charcoal and crayon sketches, and lithographs.

19th century watercolor painting entitled "Ten Indians (Children) around a Fire" by Edward Meyer Kern, Gift of the Estate of Belle J. Bushnell, 41-72-10/551

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The E.B. Swift collection of rock art reproductions linked to the San people from the Drakensberg Mountains in southern Africa (Zimbabwe, South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, Mozambique, Botswana and Namibia) made by Alexander Galloway

Reproduction of South African rock painting in Natal, South Africa. E. B. Swift Collection, Gift of Alexander Galloway, by exchange, 50-71-50/9909

Works depicting the monumental architecture and art of Mesoamerica by a variety of  scholars and artists such as Frederick Catherwood, Tatiana Proskouriakoff, Joseph Lindon Smith, Antonio Tejeda, Adela Breton, Ann Axtell Morris, and Jean Charlot

Painted portraits of prominent Native Americans in the 1890s by E. A. Burbank, originally commissioned by his uncle, Edward Everett Ayer, the then president of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

Drawings and paintings made by Ju/’hoan children and adults in southern Africa with art materials provided by the family of filmmaker John Marshall who lived with them for fourteen months in the 1950s.

Twentieth-century works by Native Americans, including Quah-Ah, Fred Kabotie, Ma Pe Wi, J.D. Roybal, Jesse Cornplanter, and Raymond Poseyesva, as well as an extensive series of Inuit prints from the earliest years of the print cooperatives

The David I. Bushnell, Jr. collection of American Art comprises about half of the Peabody's collection and includes works by George Catlin, Charles Bird King, George Gibbs, Edward Kern, and William Henry Holmes, as well as oils, watercolors, and pencil sketches by Seth Eastman and drawings by Henry Elliot depicting mid-nineteenth-century America