Approach to Montevideo, Uruguay

Conrad Martens

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Martens made this drawing at Montevideo, where he accepted a two-year position as topographical artist on the ship Beagle, to survey the coasts of Patagonia and Tierra de Fuego (Charles Darwin was one of company). Local details are included, such as the cathedral atop a cliff, the battery, and ship-filled harbor at right, but the artist's greater interest was in picturesque effects of light and weather. He employed a palette of violet-blue, gray, and brown to suggest a tropical climate and define coastal hills, milky ocean waves, and towering clouds. Smoothly executed washes and atmospheric effects demonstrate a debt to Copley Fielding, who had taught Martens in England. This view was later engraved, with a bullock cart added in the foreground, for Robert Fitzroy's "Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty's Ships Adventure and Beagle between the years 1826 and 1836, describing their examination of the Southern Shores of South America and the Beagle's Circumnavigation of the Globe," London, 1839.

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