James McNeill Whistler drew his River Nocturne on the brown paper he favored for pastels.

Raphael Soyer captures both the excitement and the boredom of life on the other side of the theater curtain. Soyer’s twin, Moses, and their younger brother Isaac, were all artists active in New York City for much of the 20th century.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler made this etching of his friend, the French sculptor Charles Drouet, in 1859 while he was living in Paris. He used a pointed needle to scratch Drouet’s form into a waxy ground atop a copper plate. The wax protected the plate from an acid, which would cut Whistler’s lines into the copper.