View of the Lake and the Island from the Lawn at Kew

William Marlow

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This delicate watercolor depicts a view in the Royal Botanic Garden of Kew (near London), designed by the celebrated eighteenth-century English architect William Chambers. This sheet is bound in an album containing the original drawings later published in print form as Plans, Elevations, Sections and Perspective Views of the Gardens and Buildings of Kew in Surrey, the Seat of Her Royal Highness, the Princess Dowager of Wales (London, 1763). This work illustrates sections of the garden and numerous structures at Kew, including a mosque, a classical rotunda, and a Chinese pagoda, demonstrating the fascination for eclecticism in garden art at this time. The soft undulating shape of the lake and its surrounding lawns is combined with the crisp silhouette of the Chinese pagoda as distant focal point, and the view expresses essential qualties of the English landscape garden, so admired and imitated on the continent.

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