A Rocky Stream, Italy

Samuel Woodforde

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In addition to landscapes, Woodforde painted portraits and histories, contributing, for example, to Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery and to Macklin's Bible. He worked in Italy from 1786 to 1791, based in Rome and spending time with his most important patron Sir Richard Colt Hoare, who built Stourhead. It was probably on an excursion into the Campagna that he came upon the scene depicted here. At the center of the sheet, a large rock stands beside a rushing stream, flanked by foliage and surmounted by a small suspension bridge. An Italianate tower rises in the distance. Crisp pen lines combine with ink wash and subtle touches of watercolor to articulate a range of textures in a drawing that is at once descriptive and expressive.

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