Denham Bridge upon the Tavy

Denham Bridge upon the Tavy

William Payne

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Payne worked as an engineer in Plymouth before moving to London in 1790, to pursue a career as a landscape painter. Here, his innate interest in man-made structures combines with a Picturesque vocabulary. He absorbed the latter from William Gilpin and here applied it to a subject near the town of Tavistock in his home county of Devon.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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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.