Doorway, Heckingham Church

John Sell Cotman

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Cotman drew the south doorway at St. Gregory’s, a twelfth-century church at Heckingham, in Norfolk, while living in Great Yarmouth. By 1818 he had made two visits to Normandy to study the region’s medieval architecture. These encounters encouraged his attention to the fine Norman stonework closer to home, in this case on a small building ten miles southeast of Norwich. He used watercolor over graphite to describe four orders of shafts with cushion capitals; arches decorated with zigzags, reels, and bobbins and wheels. The open door reveals a square-bowled Norman baptismal font within, supported by squat columns and topped with a wooden cover. A patch of blue sky can be glimpsed through a diamond-paned, early Gothic lancet window.

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