View of London from Greenwich

Joseph Mallord William Turner

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Turner here offers a panorama of greater London as seen from Greenwich Park, looking down towards the Naval Hospital designed by Sir Christopher Wren, the river Thames, and the distant city. The foreground is littered with maps and globes, with a woman holding up two plans for a naval pensioner with spectacles and crutches to inspect–a reference to England's past. Slightly behind, a man dressed in a fashionably tall top hat and yellow gloves raises his hands to celebrate the burgeoning present. Finally, a third figure further down the hill peers through a telescope at steam boats racing past sailing ships on the river–a hint at the future. The watercolor belongs to a group that the artist made around 1825, devoted to the nation's capital city. The intent was to reproduce the series as prints but the project was never realized.

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