View on the coast at Deal

Charles Bentley

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Bentley trained as an aquatint engraver of illustrated views and traveled through Britain seeking Picturesque subjects for his own accomplished watercolors. This luminous view represents Deal—a port on England's southeast coast of England where Julius Caesar landed when he invaded Britain. Beyond loosely sketched fishing nets, the contours of a rustic cottage lead the eye toward vessels beneath a soaring sky. Bentley exhibited a view of Deal at the Old Watercolour Society (formally, the Society of Painters in Water-Colours) in 1846, which suggests a similar date for the present work.

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