Sketching - George Fuller

Art Historical Context

This intimate drawing by American sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward captures fellow artist George Fuller at work in 1858. Titled *Sketching - George Fuller*, the small sheet offers a rare glimpse into the creative exchange between two figures active in mid-nineteenth-century American art. Ward, best known for his monuments rendered in bronze, here demonstrates his skill with more delicate media, portraying Fuller absorbed in the act of drawing. Executed in pen and brown ink over graphite on wove paper, the work highlights the artist’s fluid line and economical use of shading. Measuring just over seven by five inches, the drawing’s modest scale it a personal, almost spontaneous quality. Such studies were common among artists of the period as they documented colleagues and honed their observational skills. Now part of the National Gallery of Art’s collection through the John Davis Hatch Collection, the piece preserves a quiet moment of artistic camaraderie. It reminds viewers that even monumental sculptors like Ward began with simple lines on paper, celebrating the shared pursuit of capturing the world through drawing.

About the Artist

John Quincy Adams Ward · 1830–1910

John Quincy Adams Ward (1830–1910) was born in Urbana, Ohio, the fourth of eight children, and displayed an early aptitude for three-dimensional form, modeling figures in clay from childhood. In 1849 he moved to Brooklyn, New York, to apprentice under the sculptor Henry Kirke Brown, with whom he worked for seven years. Brown's emphasis on American subjects and his conviction that sculpture should ...