View of Kensington Gardens, London

John Linnell

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Compact, luminous, and intense, this unkempt view of Kensington Gardens is deliberately unidealized. Beneath dense clouds and distant trees, two wooden poles and a shed with a tiled roof punctuate a raw, sloping patch of earth. Just twenty years old, Linnell had recently converted to a nonconformist Protestant sect, acquired a camera obscura, and, influenced by William Paley’s Natural Theology, sought direct proof of God’s creation in landscape. The meticulous representation of nature became a moral imperative. To achieve it Linnell developed a distinctive technique using small touches of pure color that anticipated the work of Samuel Palmer and the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The artist probably added the identifying annotation at the bottom of the sheet at a later date.

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