Open Landscape with Herdsman, Cows, and Sheep

Thomas Gainsborough

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

With expressive freedom, Gainsborough here uses ink wash and white gouache over chalk lines on buff paper. The artist created this work, with others of the same date, to appeal to collectors of old master drawings. Here the loose technique recalls Marco Ricci (1676–1730), and incorporates effects that Gainsborough developed while experimenting with soft-ground etching in the 1770s.

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