Cascade of the Aray at Inveraray (Scotland)

John White Abbott

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A life-long resident of Exeter in Devon, Abbott was a close friend and student of Francis Towne. Both worked in a similar style and pushed the restrained vocabulary of 18th-century tinted watercolor painting in new expressive directions. This study of a waterfall was made during a 1791 tour of Scotland. Abbott typically numbered, dated, and identified subjects on the backs of his drawings, and this example is number thirty-three from a group of about eighty made that summer.

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