Farm Buildings beside a Waterway

Farm Buildings beside a Waterway

Jean Honoré Fragonard

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The clustered buildings depicted in this drawing—​cottages with high, pitched roofs and a fortified tower—represent a vernacular architecture that would have been familiar to Fragonard from his travels and from visits to the rural estates owned by his friends and patrons. He treated the subject twice, once in red chalk (private collection, New York) and here in wash over black chalk. Differences in certain details distinguish the two compositions, but one is not a study for the other. Rather, they speak to the artist’s tendency to experiment with the potential, both formal and expressive, of different media.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Farm Buildings beside a WaterwayFarm Buildings beside a WaterwayFarm Buildings beside a WaterwayFarm Buildings beside a WaterwayFarm Buildings beside a Waterway

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.