Sketchbook, Italy

Sir Joshua Reynolds

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Reynolds visited Italy for three years while in his twenties and seized the opportunity to study works from antiquity to the more recent Baroque era. As he explored churches and collections, Reynolds filled many sketchbooks with notes and drawings. This example records paintings, sculpture, and architecture visited in Rome, Florence, Venice, Milan, and Turin. It was made by using twine to secure sheets of paper into a vellum binding and could have been purchased from a stationer or made by the artist himself. The open pages represent Bernini’s famous colonnade around St. Peter’s Square in Rome opposite a rough sketch of a bearded man framed by a rustic pergola.

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