Landscape

Edgar Degas

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Degas undertook a series of landscape monotypes during a visit in October 1890 to the Burgundian estate of his friend, the artist Pierre-Georges Jeanniot. Over the course of the next two years, he made about fifty monotypes, a group of which he exhibited at the Durand-Ruel gallery in 1892. Although the artist called these views "imaginary landscapes," the present work is thought to reflect his experience traveling through Burgundy in a horse-drawn carriage. Using colored oil paints, overlaid with scumbled pastels, Degas produced a view of a mountainous landscape, partially obscured by mist, which verges on abstraction.

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