Wooded Landscape with Herdsmen and Cows

Thomas Gainsborough

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Most famous for his dashing portraits of eighteenth-century society figures, Gainsborough was also a highly skilled printmaker who in his late career experimented with the "sugar-lift" aquatint medium—named after a sugar and ink solution used to draw on the plate that later dissolves when immersed in water. The subject of grazing cows in a sun-struck sylvan setting recalls seventeenth-century Dutch pastorals.

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