Landscape with Figures and a Two-Arched Bridge

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This landscape and the three others (acc. nos. 37.165.108, 80.3.292, and 37.165.99) are typical and competent examples of the work of the forger or forgers of drawings by Guercino - especially of landscapes - who were presumably at work in Italy in the second half of the eighteenth century. All four 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 here seem rather to be pastiches, composite compositions utilizing motifs borrowed here and there 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