Standing Turkish Youth

William James Müller

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In this vigorous, vibrant study, William James Müller (a British painter of Prussian descent) captured the appearance of a young man he encountered on his travels in Lycia, in southwestern Anatolia, where the artist journeyed with the archaeologist Charles Fellows in the early 1840s. Müller applied loose, broad, wet washes to his thick, textured artist's board with some rapidity, forming the sky with fluid strokes of blue and capturing the appearance of an orange tree with a few succinct circles of bright fruit. Indeed, Müller appears to have slowed his hand only to describe the figure's distinctive shirt, a vivid patchwork of striped fabrics in ocher, purple, and red.

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