Small Italian sketchbook (containing 43 drawings on 44 leaves)

Joseph Wright (Wright of Derby)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

British eighteenth-century artists longed to visit Italy to study the riches available in Rome, Florence, and Venice; few collections of art were easily accessible at home (the National Gallery, for example, was not established until 1834). Unlike Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose Italian sketchbook is also shown in this case, Wright did not travel until he was in midcareer, reaching Rome in 1774. The Museum’s collection includes two of his Italian sketchbooks, which mostly contain wash drawings of landscapes and Roman ruins. Although Wright had established his reputation as a painter of portraits and figural groups, when he returned to England, his trip influenced him to focus on landscape.

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