Rocky Landscape with Eight Figures

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This landscape drawing and three others also in the Museum's collection (inv. nos. 17.97.17; 37.165.99; and 37.165.108) are typical and competent examples of the work of the forger (or forgers) of landscape drawings by Guercino who presumably worked in Italy during the second half of the 18th century. All four sheets are executed in a thick, pasty, dark red-brown ink that is the mark of such forgeries. Such drawings are sometimes direct copies after drawings by Guercino or facsimile reproductions thereof, but the four landscapes in the Museum's collection seem rather to be pastiches, composite compositions based on selective borrowings from Guercino's landscapes.

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