Landscape with Trees

Aelbert Cuyp

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Cuyp's looped and choppy lines, plumped up with touches of color, bring us the beauty of the Dutch countryside in summer, when warm light flickers through twigs and foliage. Cuyp was probably in his early twenties when he made this fine sheet. It belongs to a group of drawings executed in and around Utrecht, his mother's hometown. The artist would have visited that city on a number of occasions, because it is also where his father, Jacob Gerritz, lived. Cuyp had been apprenticed to Abraham Bloemaert.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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.

Metropolitan Museum of Art