Cemeteries are like indexes of a city’s history, listing the names of its deceased from famous to forgotten in an endless litany. With over two centuries of art, New York City’s realms of the dead are also footnotes to visual culture in the five boroughs, where Hudson River School painters, great influencers of abstraction, and sculptors of public art are all interred.

Some are sites of pilgrimage, others go overlooked among the hundreds of thousands of graves that claim Gotham ground.

For a two-part series on artist graves in New York, we’re starting with the 19th to early 20th century, when portraiture, decorative arts, and landscape art were part of an emerging, distinctly American style of art.