Mountain Landscape with a Castle and a Boatman

Thomas Gainsborough

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Once thought to date to the mid-1770s, when Gainsborough moved to London from Bath, the handling of this sheet suggests a date following the artist's visit to the Lake District in 1783. His early drawings respond to the English landscape, but this composition is an imagined conflation that demonstrates admiration for Claude Lorrain and Gaspard Dughet conveyed using black and white chalks on blue paper, a seventeenth-century technique. The appreciation for rough, irregular forms accords with the contemporary British aesthetic of the Picturesque.

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