Craig Goch, Moel Hebog, North Wales

Craig Goch, Moel Hebog, North Wales

Cornelius Varley

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Cornelius Varley (brother of the better-known watercolor teacher John Varley, whose distinguished pupils included John Linnell, David Cox, and William Turner of Oxford) took a bold approach to sketching in the landscape. Whereas earlier generations of British painters had sought topographical accuracy, Varley privileged color, emotion, atmosphere, and spontaneity. His resulting attempts to capture fleeting moments out-of-doors have an appealing, proto-modern abstraction. The present view, probably made during a trip to Wales in 1802, records a sunrise using a few well-placed strokes of watercolor. Regrettably, it would have few successors: by the end of the decade, Varley would redirect his passion for observation to the invention and improvement of optical instruments.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Craig Goch, Moel Hebog, North WalesCraig Goch, Moel Hebog, North WalesCraig Goch, Moel Hebog, North WalesCraig Goch, Moel Hebog, North WalesCraig Goch, Moel Hebog, North Wales

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.