The original art collection contains approximately 1000 items such as drawings, paintings, sketches, and illustrations in various media, mainly ink, pen, pencil, and watercolor, dating from the 1820s to the mid-twentieth century. The geographic scope encompasses all of the New England states and New York State, with a small number of materials that represent other locales in the United States and Europe. The collection presents both documentary and artistic works. In the documentary category, there are several watercolors of historic buildings by Lester Bridaham, who was an artist for the Historic American Buildings Survey in Massachusetts during the 1930s; Boston architect Lawrence Park's detailed renderings of several seventeenth century buildings; pen-and-ink sketches by Bostonian John W. Robbins, who specialized in the portrayal of the city's hidden alleyways; circa 1830s sketches by John Warner Barber of early New Hampshire houses; and a rare series of finely detailed sketches of farms and houses in Cumberland, Maine by an unknown artist of the late 1850s. In the artistic category, there are amateur watercolors, largely landscapes of Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, by Susannah Hickling Lewis Willard, who was a Cambridge artist working in the 1840s to the 1860s; a group of watercolors, drawings, and other genres by Almira Fenno Gendrot, a pupil of William Morris Hunt; and several pieces by George Harvey, another Hunt student.
