View from the Packet Wharf at Frenchtown Looking down Elk Creek

Benjamin Henry Latrobe American, born England

Not on view

For most of his distinguished career as an architect, Latrobe, the designer of the original U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., kept an illustrated journal of his travels throughout the country. The journal, along with most of his watercolor drawings, is now in the Maryland Historical Society. This drawing depicts the confluence of Elk and Pates’s Creeks in northern Maryland, then a point of commercial and passenger exchange on the journey from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. For the most part, the lip service that the artist pays here to picturesque composition, manifested principally in the calligraphic tree in the foreground, yields to the artist’s curiosity about the landscape’s utilitarian, agricultural, and commercial functions.

View from the Packet Wharf at Frenchtown Looking down Elk Creek, Benjamin Henry Latrobe (American (born England), Fulneck, Yorkshire 1764–1820 New Orleans, Louisiana), Watercolor, pen and iron gall ink, and graphite on off-white wove paper, American

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View from the Packet Wharf at Frenchtown Looking down Elk Creek, Benjamin Henry Latrobe (American (born England), Fulneck, Yorkshire 1764–1820 New Orleans, Louisiana), Watercolor, pen and iron gall ink, and graphite on off-white wove paper, American
View from the Packet Wharf at Frenchtown Looking down Elk Creek, Benjamin Henry Latrobe (American (born England), Fulneck, Yorkshire 1764–1820 New Orleans, Louisiana), Watercolor, pen and iron gall ink, and graphite on off-white wove paper, American

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