The Harvard Art Museums are presenting On Location: Drawing the Outdoors, a special exhibition devoted to nineteenth-century European landscape drawing, in the museum's Special Exhibition Gallery. The show brings together 137 works from across the continent, including the United Kingdom, France and Germany, and it remains on view through January 17, 2027.

The exhibition is the culmination of years of work led by Joachim Homann, the Maida and George Abrams Curator of Drawings, together with a team that includes Harvard doctoral students. It examines a moment when landscape drawing became a vehicle for personal expression, as artists left the studio to work directly in nature. Landscape drawing in this period was transformed by artists who treated nature not as a backdrop for history painting but as a subject worthy of attention in its own right, a shift Homann has described as central to the development of European art toward personal expression.

The works are organized into ten trails, groupings arranged around shared themes. The structure pays homage to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Reveries of the Solitary Walker, itself organized as ten walks, inspired Homann and the student curators throughout the project.

For visitors, the show offers a slower way of looking: drawings made outdoors, at close range, by artists paying sustained attention to trees, water, hills and sky. The exhibition is drawn from the museums' own holdings in drawings, a collection built over many decades. In an age of quick images, the exhibition argues, quietly, for the value of looking at the natural world long enough to draw it.