Farm Building by a Pond

John Sell Cotman

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The freely applied, rough-edged layers of graduated tone in the sky and the patterning Cotman devised to describe the timbers, tiles, and foliage are all characteristic of the artist’s work around 1810. Four years earlier he had returned from London to his hometown of Norwich, established a drawing school, and begun to make small works such as this for students to copy. Deliberately simplified forms characterize the two-part rustic building—with its plastered and half-timbered walls and tiled and thatched roofs—set before trees and overlooking the sea.

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