In the spring of 1865, still grieving the deaths of his two young children, the painter Frederic Church sailed for Jamaica. Over five months he walked and rode across the island, sketching its plant life, light and weather in small oil studies and graphite drawings. More than sixty of those rarely exhibited sheets go on display at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum from Friday 30 October 2026, in an exhibition marking the 200th anniversary of Church's birth. It runs until 15 February 2027.

Church, born in 1826 and the leading landscape painter of the Hudson River School, made the Jamaican journey as an act of refuge as much as exploration. The exhibition sets the sketches within that personal story and within the wider setting of a society and landscape under colonial rule, pairing close observation of tropical nature with the biography of a man remaking himself after loss. The works come from Cooper Hewitt's holdings of more than 2,000 of Church's oil studies and graphite sketches, the largest collection of his work anywhere, and the show is organised by Caitlin Condell, the museum's curator and head of drawings, prints and graphic design.

The presentation also looks forward. In 2027 the museum plans to launch a digital platform devoted to its Church drawings, offering high-resolution photography, illustrations and new scholarship across a collection that spans the artist's career and nearly all his travels, from the Catskills to Mexico. Exhibition design and graphics are by the studio TSKP x IKD, and a related online talk with Condell, hosted by the Olana historic site, accompanies the opening.

For a museum best known for design, the show is a reminder of the depth of its works on paper. Church's Jamaican sketches, made quickly and outdoors, are among the most intimate objects in a collection usually seen at a distance, and their first sustained public outing in New York gives a celebrated American painter a quieter, more personal register.