Study for "Underneath the Cork Oaks"

Study for "Underneath the Cork Oaks"

Henri-Edmond Cross (Henri-Edmond Delacroix)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This unfinished drawing reveals how the Neo-Impressionist artist, Henri-Edmond Cross, built up his watercolors from an underlying graphite sketch to a mosaic of brush marks in variously saturated colors. This sheet relates to an oil painting of 1908, titled "Under the Cork Oaks" (private collection), which situates three figures within a grove of curvilinear trees, characteristic of the Mediterranean environment where the artist lived on the Côte d'Azur. Instead of people as in the painting, the study includes an animal grazing in the undergrowth and reprised in the margin at right. By reserving areas of the paper amidst the accumulation of watercolor strokes, the artist began to suggest the dappled nature of the light among the leaves.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Study for "Underneath the Cork Oaks"Study for "Underneath the Cork Oaks"Study for "Underneath the Cork Oaks"Study for "Underneath the Cork Oaks"Study for "Underneath the Cork Oaks"

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.