Landscape with Riverbed and Mountains

Alexander Cozens

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This mountainous landscape with a rocky, sundrenched foreground and a winding riverbed or valley is a beautiful example of the kinds of imaginary views Alexander Cozens produced during the 1770s and 1780s. Built up from broad washes, hatching, and stippling, applied with a brush in varying shades of gray and set off against a uniform yellowish wash as the lightest tone, the two boulders or mountains emerge from a sophisticated interplay and interlacing of light and dark patches of ink. The almost complete absence of vegetation as well as human or animal life lend this work a dreamlike quality.

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