House of Pompey at Albano

Richard Wilson

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Wilson began his career as a portraitist but turned exclusively to landscape during a trip to Italy in the 1750s. At that time, he set out to train himself as a landscapist by making on-the-spot sketches in the Italian countryside and compositional sketches in the studio. This delicately rendered townscape was no doubt made on the spot when he visited Albano, perhaps in 1754, and includes none of the artificial devices that characterize his studio works. The ruins in the city, situated in the Alban Hills, twelve miles southeast of Rome, are today recognized as ancient baths. In the eighteenth century, they were thought to belong to the palace of Pompeius Magnus (106-48 B.C.).

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