10/02/2026
It’s First Friday! On the First Friday of each month, we share a favorite from the Read House & Gardens. This month’s favorite thing is presented by Read House ambassador Noel Ank:
Hettie Smith, a member of the Couper family and one of the Read House’s stewards, painted this depiction of Jefferson’s Wharf in 1891. Though no longer standing today, Jefferson’s Wharf’s former location on Delaware Street designated it as a primary landing site for both goods and people.
Hettie’s art is an example of watercolor landscape painting, a genre that flourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Watercolors trace their roots to 1700s Great Britain, where they were initially used to create preliminary sketches that would then be painted over with oil paint, the primary medium of prestigious painters at the time.
Watercolor’s ability to capture minute, delicate details would soon attract artists to experiment with it alone, allowing the medium to develop in its own right. It became popular to use watercolors to depict plants and landscapes, taking advantage of the pigments’ transparency and malleability to capture naturalistic scenes, organisms, and light.
Hettie Smith follows this artistic tradition; we can imagine her in New Castle, armed with tubes of paint, paper, and brushes, recording a familiar scene near her home. Though Jefferson’s Wharf no longer survives today, Hettie’s work does, carrying with it a piece of New Castle’s history and a reminder that any one of us can act as historic preservationists in our own ways.
