X-Ray Visionary

THE NEW CRITERION, April 2026

X-ray visionary

On “Egon Schiele: Portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff,” at the Neue Galerie.

The portraits of Egon Schiele (1890–1918) really get under the skin. “Skinned hares” is how Schiele’s model Liliana Amon (1892–1966), in fact, described his figures in her autobiographical roman à clef, Barrières, some two decades after the artist’s untimely death. “That can’t be! These people have no skin,” the book declares, concluding, “Egon saw the world in a special way; he saw it, so to speak, under the skin, and painted in green, blue, and red.”

Just how the Austrian artist went from painting reserved landscapes at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna, where he had been accepted in 1906 at the age of sixteen, to the flayed figures of his final decade is now the focus of a small but convincing exhibition at the Neue Galerie.1 Amon is the catalyst for the story. Living with the young artist, pregnant with another man’s child, she connects through Schiele with an obstetrician who takes her on as a charity case. That doctor is Erwin von Graff, a surgeon and gynecologist twelve years older than Schiele and the focus of the exhibition. A champion of the promising artist, Graff becomes a subject for a now well-known portrait and a conduit for an unsparing new line of subject matter for Schiele. With forty works from 1910 to 1918 centered around the Graff portrait, a sizable oil on canvas that lends its name to the title of this exhibition, these results are now gathered together in a one-room gallery off the second-floor permanent collection. The show has been organized by Renée Price and Janis Staggs, the museum director and curatorial director, respectively, of the Neue Galerie.

The Portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff (1910), listed as coming from a private collection as well as being part of the Neue’s “extended” collection, makes frequent house calls to Eighty-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue. We last saw it in “Living Landscapes,” the Schiele exhibition I reviewed in these pages a year ago (see “Schiele’s living dead,” January 2025). The portrait has appeared some half dozen times on the walls of the Neue Galerie since Ronald S. Lauder opened his museum for German and Austrian art in 2001. Its image is unsettling, even confounding, but recent research into Schiele as well as the life of Dr. Graff now paints a newly penetrating picture of the arresting work, the output that surrounded it, and the figure it portrays. This show is a “portrait” in more ways than one.

Egon Schiele, Portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff, 1910, Oil on canvas, Private collection.

The painting first presents to us as an affliction of unknown origin. The gaunt doctor stands straight, staring back at us, in front of what we might take to be a wall of glazed white hospital tile. The atmosphere is clinical and blinding. The light of the painting washes out his short-sleeve surgical shirt and vest and nearly everything else surrounding him in white. Against the glare, what we see is Graff’s dark, exposed flesh—his thin face, piercing eyes, furrowed brow, and bony hands holding up his mottled right arm as though to keep it sanitary before examination. His fingernails appear to fall from his skin. A bandage is wrapped around the end of his right ring finger.

What are we to make of this skin? The blistered arms and cut finger? Is this a trustworthy doctor? Is this even sanitary? Writing about the painting in the 1970s, the Schiele scholar Alessandra Comini suggested the Graff appears as the “shrunken-headed cadaver in a state of rigor mortis,” his bandage a “grim joke.”

Graff seems burned, even irradiated. New research suggests that he was. Graff is now known to have experimented with the then-new technology of the X-ray at a time before the effects of its long-term use were well understood. Exposed to high doses of radiation, like other doctors and scientists of his time, he developed radiodermatitis. The effects of this skin condition can be closely matched to the scorched appearance in his portrait.

Now at the Neue, two studies for the portrait appear alongside the final painting, both here from private collections—one a trio of head studies in profile in charcoal on paper, the other closer in composition to the painting in pencil, charcoal, and wash on paper. Both studies are more academic and far less expressionistic than the final work. In the doctor’s burnt limbs, we can then say that Schiele grasped his future. Moving beyond the sentiment of the Jugendstil and his role model Gustav Klimt, with his luxuriant emphasis on surfaces, Schiele looked instead to the subcutaneous depths of modern life.

From here on out, this exhibition argues, Schiele’s portraits would be peeled raw. Through the clinical window provided by Graff, Schiele found a new direction for his own artistic experiments. “Schiele really came into his own as an artist in 1910, the year he completed the portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff,” says Price, who views the painting as “one of the most important works in the extended collection of the museum.” She continues: “This is where Schiele really becomes Schiele.”

As Schiele became Schiele, Graff became a key patron and protector. It was a connection that continued through the day of the artist’s death eight years later. Graff, to start, saw Amon through to a healthy birth. He also arranged for her child’s adoption while convincing her to move out of the artist’s studio. As Schiele gave his portrait to the doctor as an expression of his gratitude, their relationship extended beyond the indigent young mother. Through a special arrangement, Graff also provided Schiele with access to other expectant mothers and newborn infants within his clinical orbit—subjects that make up most of the remaining works in this exhibition.

We can only speculate as to the exact nature of how Schiele encountered these figures and gained their acceptance as models, often in radically exposed and vulnerable positions. Neither Graff nor Schiele ever detailed the circumstances of their collaboration. Perhaps Schiele followed Graff on his rounds or took up a position in his operating theater. The results were not the remote clinical perspective we find in, say, Thomas Eakins’s Gross Clinic. Instead, we encounter models who appear close-up, cropped, and intimately engaged with the artist.

We know Schiele composed with swift intensity. Over his brief ten-year career, he created an astonishing three hundred paintings and three thousand works on paper. A few dashed lines of his models in pencil, crayon, or charcoal on paper could be filled in later with watercolor. For his unsparing observations, he drew on whatever inexpensive media was at his disposal. Crumpled brown paper appears in several works. He further cropped his figures in harsh and unsparing perspectives, exposing them in a new light. Confronted by naked and contorted bodies, Schiele employed his own penetrating vision.

His Newborn Baby of 1910, in gouache, watercolor, and black crayon on paper, here from an anonymous lender, serves as an example of Schiele’s new perspective on the human form. The baby twists on his back to the point where his head is out of the frame of the composition. Close examination of the paper reveals how subsequent owners attempted to fold and matte the work so that it would appear more centered. The Neue exhibition suggests that Schiele intended the work to be off-center. Seated Male Nude with Extended Arm, a watercolor, gouache, and black crayon on paper from the Neue Galerie collection, is similarly disjointed, with its twisted right arm, bent head, and brown skin that appears to tear away from the spine. So too is Pregnant Woman (1910), from an anonymous lender, with her green face and belly disconnected from her hands and feet.

Egon Schiele, Seated Male Nude with Extended Arm, 1910, Watercolor, gouache & black crayon on paper, Neue Galerie. Photo: Hulya Kolabas.

The results of Schiele’s renderings are unsettling and often off-putting. Our initial reaction can be to tie the hospital gown and quickly shut the door. In all, some twelve drawings of pregnant women can be ascribed to the Graff clinic, along with Schiele’s portraits of newborns, sick women, and stillbirths.

Today these can seem sensationalist, exploitative—and probable evidence of a hipaa violation. In his time, Schiele connected his vision to the contorted forms of the Northern Gothic and its symbols of life, death, and renewal. In his penetrating stare, the flesh of a man, the bark of a tree, and the rooftops of a town might all call for mortification.

In the irradiated figure of Graff, Schiele also saw a modern figure for his own salvation. The catalogue for this exhibition, written by Elisabeth Dutz, the chief curator of the graphic-art collection at the Albertina Museum in Vienna, makes a deep study of Graff and documents his long career in Austria and the United States. An auxiliary doctor at Vienna’s Second University Women’s Hospital at the time of his first acquaintance with Schiele, Graff became an accomplished gynecologist and surgeon. He was also a cellist, a handball player, and someone who could prepare an “exquisite Italian risotto,” according to Dutz. He spent time teaching at the University of Iowa and maintained an office on New York’s Park Avenue. A comprehensive list of his publications and lectures from 1901 through 1939 give some indications of his fields of expertise, concluding with papers on the “Etiology of Prolapse,” “Bilateral Uretreovaginal Fistula: Successful Implantation of Both Ureters into the Bladder Seven and Eleven Months Following Total Hysterectomy,” and “Tubal Sterilization by the Madlener Technique.”

Despite these professional accomplishments, it was Graff’s visionary relationship with Schiele that today most defines him for us—a fact that Graff himself seems to have recognized as he collected the artist’s work, brought him into the trust of his patients, and attended to Schiele’s own life and death.

One of the final objects in this exhibition is Schiele’s death mask. A victim of the flu pandemic of 1918, the artist died three days after watching his sick and pregnant wife pass away. One of his last acts was to draw his fevered wife on her deathbed. Days later, just hours before Schiele’s own demise, Graff paid the artist a house call, most likely to administer a palliative dose of morphine. Schiele’s final vision was of the doctor who first inspired him eight years before.

1. “Egon Schiele: Portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff” opened at the Neue Galerie, New York, on February 12 and remains on view through May 4, 2026. 

Winter journey

THE NEW CRITERION, MARCH 2026

Winter Journey

On The Winter Show, Sotheby’s “Masters Week,” Master Drawings New York & Viollet-le-Duc

You can correlate your barometer to The Winter Show. Whenever this annual antiques, art, and design fair appears for its weeklong run at the Park Avenue Armory, be assured a snowstorm is in the forecast. Its seventy-first season was no different.1 Fortunately, this storied fair still offers up some warmth for the cold spell.

Over the past few years, I have lamented the dilution of what had been known from 1955 until yesterday as the Winter Antiques Show (see my “Brown in town” in The New Criterion of March 2024). Founded by the folk-art dealers John Bihler and Henry Coger as a fundraiser for the East Side House Settlement, the fair has gradually moved away from what was once a focused exposition of American art and antiques to become more modern and international. The end result can now seem like a watered-down presentation of high-end curios, knickknacks, and anything-goes. As I noted two years ago, much like grandma’s cherished credenza, the word “antique” was even kicked to the snowbound curb and dropped from the fair’s title.

The organizers behind this deaccession are not entirely to blame. The market for Americana has been a central victim of our cultural amnesia and ritualistic self-loathing. For the afflicted, nothing must be quite so triggering as the chimes of grandpa’s grandfather clock. The best we might hope for in the younger set is that they toss some old gimcrack into their modern and contemporary mix.

Such was the notion behind this year’s “private study of an imaginary young collector.” The “immersive installation” (really, just another booth) curated by the art advisor Patrick Monahan presented a mash-up of works from twelve dealers that blended “objects across time periods and cultures—from Classical antiquities to contemporary ceramics.” Another such initiative was a display of “The American Chair: 250 Years of Form.” With eighteen chairs stacked in two three-by-three grids, from Shaker to Saarinen, the organizers were desperate to proclaim that diversity is our bench.

Fifty years ago, at the time of the U.S. bicentennial, interest in American art and antiques reached a high point. The same should be expected this year. Fortunately, at least some of the exhibitors at The Winter Show read the semiquincentennial memo. Elie Nadelman and Paul Manship, two exuberant American sculptors from the first half of the twentieth century, were front and center at Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts. Mixed in among Nadelman’s photographs and drawings, his Two Circus Women (ca. 1928–29), collected from the artist’s Riverdale estate, might have been familiar to balletgoers. The smooth, white-chocolate figures in papier-mâché and plaster, fused as though melted together in a giant pocket, served as a model for one of the two monumental enlargements made posthumously in Carrara marble to decorate the promenade of Lincoln Center’s New York State (David H. Koch) Theater. Meanwhile, Manship’s dynamic bronze Actaeon (transformed by Diana into a stag and pursued by his own hounds) and Manship’s storks and herons from the 1920s and ’30s remind us of the mythic range of this great sculptor beyond his Rockefeller Center Prometheus.

Robert Henri, Celestine, 1920, Oil on canvas, Avery Galleries.

Elsewhere a stoic bust of George Washington by the studio of Jean-Antoine Houdon watched over the Old Masters at Robert Simon Fine Art. There were several Americana Easter eggs decorating the displays at Hirschl & Adler. A smart presentation of “American Game Boards c. 1890–1940” revealed the modernist sensibilities behind checkers and parcheesi. Debra Force Fine Art featured Richmond Barthé’s dynamic figure Inner Music (ca. 1956) next to Milton Avery’s limpid watercolor portrait Artist by the Sea (1945). Jeffrey Tillou Antiques presented Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington’s Yawning Tiger (cast ca. 1917) alongside Murdoc Indian dolls from Northeastern California (ca. 1860–75). Meanwhile, portraits by Robert Henri adorned more than one booth; Henri’s Celestine (1920) at Avery Galleries was a highlight.

With an extra-long run—a notorious marathon for exhibitors—The Winter Show straddles the timing of the American-art auctions and the Old Master sales. This year, Sotheby’s brought its “Masters Week” auctions from York Avenue to Madison and its new headquarters at the old Whitney.

Last fall, for its inaugural sales at the venue, I was among the cast of thousands that flocked to the opening of Sotheby’s Breuer showroom. With lines wrapping around to Park Avenue, the new location certainly succeeded in bringing the auction season to the city’s broader consciousness. As a showcase venue with significantly less square footage than Sotheby’s former factory floors on York Avenue, however, the opening display also revealed the squeeze of the new site.

“For things to remain the same, everything must change,” wrote Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa in his 1958 novel The Leopard. The same goes for today’s art market. With offices now offsite, Sotheby’s staff can no longer float between desk and showroom. Gallery walls must be torn out overnight to create the auction floor. Due to space constraints, minor works up for auction might be demoted to display at the York Avenue offices—a scarlet letter for sales that art advisors now try to preclude in their contracts. And even with these many contingencies, Sotheby’s Breuer still felt overstuffed. Ample room might have been cleared out for the top-line Lauder sales, but lesser works were packed floor to ceiling in a warren of tight passageways amid the building’s increasingly cramped upper floors.

With expectations diminished, however, I was surprised how well the 2026 “Masters Week” went off at the Breuer last month.2 The auction house must have learned a lesson or two from the fall. Works on paper, which I expected to be relegated to the Breuer attic, appeared lower down in prime real estate. Smaller works were still arranged salon-style but now in intelligent groupings, which helped to demonstrate how collections hang together. The presentation overall lived up to the promise of bringing the auction house from bedpan alley to a block from Museum Mile. Here is a new venue with ready access to significant work in constant rotation on free display—and free, moreover, of the turgid mandates of the museum world. It can even be yours, if the price is right.

Sotheby’s pegged this “Masters Week” to a few showstoppers: Antonello da Messina’s lachrymose double-sided Ecce Homo; Saint Jerome in Penitence (ca. 1460–65); a remarkably modern-looking Mummy Portrait of a Man from Roman Egypt (ca. late first century A.D.); Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s expressive Head of a Bearded Man (ca. 1770); and Rembrandt’s Young Lion Resting (ca. 1638–42), a small work on paper billed as “the most important drawing by the artist to appear at auction in half a century.” That final work came from the Leiden Collection, which Karen Wilkin covered in these pages in December. The collector Thomas S. Kaplan had put the piece up for auction to benefit Panthera, his nonprofit dedicated to the conservation of wild cats (with an auction-house estimate of fifteen to twenty million dollars).

Rembrandt, Young Lion Resting, ca. 1638–42, Black & white chalk on paper.

There was much here to catch the eye beyond the headline sales in the few days it was all on view. An arrangement of elegant female figures had us in a game of cherchez la femme, in particular John William Godward’s stunning profile portrait Cleonice (1913). Jean-Léon Gérôme’s haunting and tender Madeleine Juliette Gérôme avec ses Poupées (ca. 1883), sun-kissed interiors by the Danish painter Peter Ilsted, and several satisfying Corots rounded out the auction of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European art. A selection of charming works by lesser-known lights to be sold online revealed the deep bench of nineteenth-century European painters that few museums would now choose to exhibit but which deserve renewed attention. For its auctions of “Master Painting and Sculpture from Four Millennia,” Sotheby’s featured several alluring standouts, such as its seventeenth-century Portrait of Barbara Urslerin van Beck—a Lombard School depiction of Europe’s most famous “bearded lady.” An auction of works on paper from the collection of the late Diane A. Nixon proved how a dedicated collector could still amass a significant collection of master drawings over just the past few decades.

With many attractions, it’s appealing to consider what most strikes your own fancy. As for me, I would have been happy to walk away with Pietro Paoletti’s seven shadow boxes of plaster casts. These early nineteenth-century travel souvenirs preserved the sights of the Grand Tour in cameo relief from the days before picture postcards and the iPhone selfie.

Timed to the winter auctions—“Masters Week” at Sotheby’s, along with the pendant “Classic Week” at Christie’s—Master Drawings New York comes each year as a highlight of highlights.3 Rather than taking over a single venue, this decentralized fair presents thirty-six dealers partnering together in a weeklong presentation spread across New York’s specialized Upper East Side galleries. Over the last decade, this loose confederation has transformed into a must-see destination for curators as well as a singular access point into the Old Masters for scholars and collectors. It can also turn the marathon of this cultural season into a decathlon event. You hurdle over snowbanks, wind-sprint up townhouse stairs, and elbow out your favorite curator for your own close-up look at what is on view. To see it all might not be impossible but is still unlikely unless you have freed up the full week of the run. Better to print out the street map of exhibitors and pick a few you know well along with a selection of the less familiar.

This year at London-based Guy Peppiatt Fine Art, on view at Arader Galleries, the selection of cartoons by Edward Lear were particularly enjoyable. So too Edward Burra’s Dancing Party. At Nicholas Hall and W. M. Brady & Co., Bernardo Castello’s drawing, Genoese Arriving in Jerusalem, warmed my irredentist heart. Paris-based Marty de Cambiaire Galerie, on view at Gerald Peters Gallery, featured the red-chalk Portrait of an Italian Girl, now confirmed to be an early drawing by Edgar Degas.

Edgar Degas, Portrait of an Italian Girl, 1856–57, Red chalk on paper, Marty de Cambiaire.

At Rome-based Miriam di Penta Fine Arts, on view at Robert Simon Fine Art, Leonor Fini’s expressive pen-and-ink portraits were hard to beat. Meanwhile, across the floor at Robert Simon, I was again delighted to see Anthony Baus’s contemporary drawing Manhattan Arch quietly added in the mix, a new master among the old.

London’s Abbott & Holder, on view at Kate Oh Gallery, featured two special collections among its selection of British works on paper. The first was the study collection of the late David Bindman, a professor of art history at University College London. The second: devastating sketches of the Dachau mortuary, crematorium, and gas chamber, recorded just a day after its American liberation in 1945, by Brian Stonehouse, a British artist and Nacht und Nebel prisoner who had been held at the death camp.

Last year at this time, with a show of European master drawings on view at the Wadsworth Atheneum, we saw how Masters Week serves to inspire serious exhibitions farther afield (see my “Good on paper” in The New Criterion of March 2025). This year, the great collateral benefit is “Viollet-le-Duc: Drawing Worlds” at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.4

If Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–79) had only overseen the mid-nineteenth-century restoration of Paris’s Notre-Dame, we would say Dayenu. If he had only renovated and reconstructed Vézelay Abbey, the Basilica of Saint Denis, Sainte-Chapelle, Château de Roquetaillade, and the medieval city of Carcassonne—Dayenu! But Viollet-le-Duc was also an astonishing illustrator, right up there with the greats of his age. The hundred and fifty works on paper, here mostly on loan from the Médiathèque du patrimoine et de la photographie, a department of the French Ministry of Culture, will be revelatory even to those who know Viollet-le-Duc well.

Spearheaded by the cocurators Barry Bergdoll and Martin Bressani, this first major U.S. exhibition of the French architect, artist, and master planner brings together his remarkable studies of Notre-Dame to prove just how much of the Gothic structure reflects his nineteenth-century interventions—now mostly restored after the devastating 2019 fire. The exhibition also collects his many mountain landscapes and imaginative historical reconstructions.

Following the upheavals of the French Revolution, Viollet-le-Duc set his life’s mission to make France beautiful again. In his valoration of the medieval, he saw the true face of the French soul. It is regrettable that this exhibition feels the need at moments to speculate on the “deep structures” of “climate and race.” A thinly argued section on his racial preferences feels like another poststructural prosecution of greatness. His views on universal suffrage or the gold standard, or whatever, may not accord with our contemporary sensibilities either. C’est la vie. At least his accomplishments on paper speak for themselves, not to mention his singular legacies in brick and stone.

1. The Winter Show was on view at the Park Avenue Armory, New York, from January 23 through February 1, 2026. 

2. “Masters Week” was on view at Sotheby’s, New York, from January 30 through February 4, 2026. 

3. Master Drawings New York was on view on the Upper East Side from January 30 through February 7, 2026. 

4. “Viollet-le-Duc: Drawing Worlds” opened at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery, New York, on January 28 and remains on view through May 24, 2026. 

The Spirit of ’76

THE NEW CRITERION, February 2026

The spirit of ’76

On “Declaring the Revolution: America’s Printed Path to Independence,” at the New-York Historical Society.

The nation’s semiquincentennial will provide many opportunities to revisit America’s founding. A small but enthralling show now at the New-York Historical Society deserves to be a foundational first stop. “Declaring the Revolution: America’s Printed Path to Independence” draws on the extraordinary collection of the philanthropist David M. Rubenstein.1 It tells the story of American independence through sixty documents that forged national resolve in a concise and compelling presentation. Curated by Mazy Boroujerdi, with detailed labels and a well-conceived arrangement of material, the one-room exhibition lays out the path to war and reveals the long road to American independence through the primary documents that took us there step by step. (A side note: now doing business as merely “The New York Historical,” the 222-year-old society is one of several institutions sadly struck with brand aphasia.)

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” wrote Thomas Jefferson. So too must we refresh our understanding of these revolutionary materials. Take the Declaration of Independence. A well-recognized copy serves as the center of the historical society’s display. It may come as some surprise that the edition we most associate with this primary object of civic veneration was not created on July 4 or even in 1776 but in 1823, as this example attests.

The original Declaration, drafted by Thomas Jefferson with additions from a committee of the Second Continental Congress that included John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, was composed in manuscript. Their language built on the brief statement of the Lee Resolution, approved on July 2, 1776, which resolved that the colonies were “free and independent States.” July 2 might just as well be America’s independence day, but it was the July 4 adoption of the full and finely wrought Declaration that gives us our anniversary date.

On July 5, the congress rushed this manuscript to the nearby print shop of John Dunlap to produce between a hundred and two hundred broadsides for distribution across the colonies and soon around the world. Four days later, after receiving a copy by mail from John Hancock, George Washington had one of these broadsides read aloud to his brigades assembled on the commons in lower Manhattan. Following this 6 p.m. announcement, a mob tore down the statue of George III in Bowling Green, an action Washington lamented for its riotous “want of order” (the statue’s lead was recast into musket balls for the Patriot cause).

The Declaration of Independence, 1823, Engrossed print copy. Photo: Vincent Dilio, courtesy of David M. Rubenstein.

Dunlap’s poster-sized broadsides are the earliest extant records of the Declaration. The original manuscript was lost during typesetting. On August 2, the Continental Congress memorialized its adoption by commissioning an engrossed, or handwritten and enlarged, version on vellum, most likely from the pen of Timothy Matlack. This is the edition that famously received John Hancock’s John Hancock, along with the signatures of the other delegates present. Since the New York Provincial Congress officially adopted the Declaration only in the interim on July 9, the opening lines were updated from a “declaration by the representation of the United States of America in general congress,” as the broadside reads, to “the unanimous declaration of the thirteen United States of America.”

The engrossed Declaration is the one now on display in a titanium case filled with argon gas at the National Archives Museum in Washington, D.C. Yet it too most likely is not the edition we most closely associate with this document. That’s because, even less than fifty years after its creation, the condition of the engrossed Declaration had already deteriorated. In 1820, John Quincy Adams, then the secretary of state, commissioned a set of two hundred official copies of the engrossed Declaration from the Washington engraver William J. Stone. Working with the document for three years, through a system of mirrors and tracing, and perhaps the lifting of some ink from the original document, Stone created a copperplate negative of the engrossed Declaration, including its fifty-six signatures. As with the original, he printed these facsimiles on vellum.

The Stone facsimile, a faithful print of the engrossed Declaration with wording that was once again legible, was distributed to federal and state repositories and the living members of the founding generation. Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, James Monroe, James Madison, and the Marquis de Lafayette each received two copies.

Today fewer than fifty known copies remain of Stone’s 1823 printing. Yet this is the version now most regularly reproduced since it reads closer to the original Declaration than the faded document bathed in inert gas in Washington. David M. Rubinstein, the cofounder of the Carlyle Group, the private equity firm, has collected the few Stone facsimiles in private hands and dedicated them to public display alongside his collection of other key American documents. We may never be closer to the Declaration than with his copy now on loan and available for detailed examination.

“Declaring the Revolution” makes a compelling case for the cause of American independence as a continuation of English rights and liberties. As represented by the other documents on display, the Declaration comes at the fulcrum of a two-decade-long conflict as history’s least revolutionary document of revolution. “Prudence,” it reads, “indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.” Beyond its idealistic opening, the Declaration is mainly a legalistic enumeration of grievances, of a “long train of abuses and usurpations” with “repeated injuries” leading to a reluctant resolution grounded in law and custom. The great irony of American independence, and its greatest salvation, was its conservative assertion of English rights against an un-English monarch:

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Paul Revere, The Bloody Massacre perpetrated in King Street, Boston, on March 5th, 1770, Hand-colored engraving. Photo: Vincent Dilio, courtesy of David M. Rubenstein. 

At the historical society, flanking the Stone facsimile to the left, is an edition of the Declaration of arguably even greater rarity and import. This is the version printed by the Pennsylvania Evening Post on July 6. It was the Declaration’s first truly public appearance, typeset from the broadside of a day before and available for “only two Coppers.” (Rubenstein purchased his copy at auction in 2013 for $632,500, the highest price then paid for a historical newspaper.) Immediately to the right of the Stone facsimile, the inclusion of a 1773 Slave Petition for Freedom feels forced. The document nevertheless serves to reveal the emancipatory impulse already in circulation at the time of revolution. “The divine spirit of freedom, seems to fire every human breast on this continent,” it asserts. The state of Massachusetts, where this petition was issued, abolished slavery seven years later.

In a center vitrine, in line of sight with the Declaration, are the documents and books that informed its ideals. Included here are copies of John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, in an American printing from 1773. First published in 1689, this treatise arguing for the natural rights of “life, liberty and property” gained renewed attention in the revolutionary era. So too did Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, here in a copy from 1651, laying the case for the social contract between government and the governed.

Fronting this display is Magna Carta, represented by an eighteenth-century engraved facsimile of the 1215 document preserved at the British Library. (It is noteworthy that the only thirteenth-century version of this document in the United States is currently at the National Archives Museum—there on long-term loan from David M. Rubenstein).

As with the liberal arguments that surrounded Magna Carta and later the issuance of the English Bill of Rights, here in a 1689 first edition, the colonists saw their cause as grounded in English law. Their struggle for redress, at first, came about as forms of isolated resistance and then as a united colonial civil war. At the historical society, this story begins to the left with a copy of the 1765 Stamp Act. The much-maligned taxation scheme, designed to underwrite the British military presence along the colonies’ extensive frontiers following the French and Indian War, was met with compelling counterarguments from several American voices. Benjamin Franklin’s testimony against it in the House of Commons in 1766 is here represented in a printed account of his four-hour-long examination. “No, never” would the colonists pay the duty “unless compelled by force of arms,” he declared. While that act was repealed, new British taxes led to civic disturbances culminating in the Boston Massacre of 1770, made all the more bloody in the colonial mind by Paul Revere’s contemporaneous engraving. As Massachusetts became a center of colonial insurgency to British military occupation, the first shot of Lexington and Concord in 1775, “heard round the world” (in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous phase of 1837), brought the conflict into open rebellion.

A hallway wall, just around the corner from the main gallery and easy to miss, includes documents related to the prosecution of the Revolutionary War divided between its northern and southern theaters. The path to American independence was paved by more than just the writings of history’s most motivated lawyers. It involved nearly a decade of armed conflict and more losses than wins for the American side. These displays lay out the accounts, records, and maps of the campaigns while also revealing the rising international interest in American independence. Traité d’Amitié et de Commerce, Conclu entre le Roi et les États-Unis de l’Amérique Septentrionale, reads a vital 1778 treaty of French support for the revolution. Le Général Washington Ne Quid Detrimenti capiat Res publica is the title of a French print from circa 1780.

“Declaring the Revolution” reveals the indomitable spirit of ’76 that buoyed the Patriot cause to force the surrender of Charles Cornwallis, the commander of British southern forces, at Yorktown on October 19, 1781, and brought about the Definitive Treaty between Great Britain, and the United States of America, Signed at Paris, the 3rd Day of September 1783. The astonishing victory continues to inspire the spirit of liberty and recalls the debt of sacrifice made in the name of freedom.

1. “Declaring the Revolution: America’s Printed Path to Independence” opened at the New-York Historical Society on November 14, 2025, and remains on view through April 12, 2026. ↩