Culver Cliff, Isle of Wight

William Dyce

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Dyce is best known for meticulously-rendered religious subjects that earned him the nickname "the British Nazarene." Completely different in character, this watercolor was made for his own pleasure in the summer of 1847, during a stay on the Isle of Wight to paint "Neptune Resigning his Empire of the Seas to Britainnia" for the royal residence of Osborne House. Turning his attention from allegory to the physical realities of the English coast, Dyce represents men collecting wood from a wrecked boat, and fishermen carrying bundles across Sandown Bay, with the distinctive chalk face of Culver Cliff standing out in the distance.

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