Build Your Own World. So Fast Will Disagreeable Things...Vanish (Illustration for Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Nature")
1830–92
Medium
Pen and brown ink
Dimensions
sheet: 5 13/16 x 8 9/16 in. (14.7 x 21.7 cm)
Classification
Drawings
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Gift of Whitney Dall Jr., in memory of Emily Dall, 1976
Accession Number
1976.625.20(3)
Tags
Art Historical Context
**Build Your Own World. So Will Disagreeable Things...anish** is a captivating pen and brown ink drawing by Christopher Pear Cranch, created between 1830 and 1892. Cranch, a multifaceted artist, poet, and Transcendental thinker, crafted this illustration for Ralph Waldo Emerson's seminal essayNature* (1836), a cornerstone of American transcendentalism. The title quotes Emerson directly, urging readers to construct an inner world of harmony where "disagreeable appearances" like swine, spiders, snakes, pests, and societal ills dissolve. Held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Drawings and Print...