Tintern Abbey by moonlight

John "Warwick" Smith

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

John "Warwick" Smith – whose sobriquet refers to his patron, George Greville, 2nd Earl of Warwick – made extensive tours of Wales between 1784 and 1806 and prepared a series of brightly colored, small-scale watercolor views. Many were made with an eye to collaborating with his former tutor William Gilpin on a second edition of that author's celebrated "Observations on the River Wye" (1789), a publication liberally illustrated with prints. This drawing depicts the ruins of Tintern Abbey by moonlight from a vantage point across the river. By the late 1780s, when this drawing was made, the artist had abandoned the use of ink outlines and was applying strong local colors in a distinctive, painterly manner. He created the reflections of the moonlight upon water by scratching through the pigment to reveal the white paper beneath, creating an evocative nighttime scene that supports his reputation as one of the earliest romantic watercolorists.

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