Ruined Castle

John Sell Cotman

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Areas of crude handling, and lack of finesse in forms and shadows, suggest that this drawing was made by a student copying a Cotman original. The master had returned to his home town of Norwich to run a school between 1823 and 1833, then moved back to London in 1834 to become drawing master at King's College School, retaining that position for the rest of his life. Part of his teaching practise was to lend students examples of his watercolors to copy.

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