“Water colors with wonderful fidelity to nature and with such delicacy of touch and such genuine artistic sense of color”

According to a letter to the Editor (extract presented below) of The Country Gentleman, from Mr. E. L. R. of Baltimore, Md:

Mr William Coxe was for several years a member of Congress from New Jersey but such was his fondness for pomology that notwithstanding the many demands upon his time in consequence of his political and other pursuits he still found leisure to collect materials for an enlarged and elegant edition of his work on Fruit Trees.

This unfortunately, he did not live to bring to perfection. It had been his intention that the second edition should have contained beautiful colored engravings to accompany the descriptions of each of the fruits mentioned in his book. For this purpose his daughter, Mrs McMurtrie still living in Philadelphia, and her accomplished sisters had prepared numerous accurate drawings of life size upon Bristol board of the fruits to be represented and then painted them in water colors with wonderful fidelity to nature and with such delicacy of touch and such genuine artistic sense of color that it is greatly to be regretted that these evidences of early American art have not seen the light in the form originally intended.

source: The Country Gentleman, Volume 9 via Google eBook

L. Tucker, 1857