Ruined Castle and Trees

Alexander Cozens

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This quickly sketched view of a ruined castle with a vegetated foreground and possibly trees is an example of Cozens’s technique of "blotting." To create this drawing, Cozens laid down a faint wash first, which has mottled over time, and then further defined the image with black ink. Cozens used this technique primarily to create imaginary landscape views, but in this case the composition was inspired by a real place: the Tomb of Caecilia Metella, a 1st century BC mausoleum on the Via Appia just outside the city of Rome. The crenellated brick wall of the ruined castle depicted here was added sometime between the 11th and 14th century. In 1762, Cozens exhibited an oil painting of the same subject, though this is lost today.

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