View of Calcar on the Lower Rhine near Cleves

Aelbert Cuyp

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Belonging to a group of broad panoramas from the early 1640s, all with a fold in the middle, Cuyp must have made this drawing during a trip to the eastern Netherlands, near the German border. The town of Calcar can be seen at the right; behind it lies the Monterberg, a favorite destination for outings. Cuyp, one of the outstanding Dutch landscapists of the seventeenth century, set the view of Calcar and the surrounding flat landscape against a vigorously drawn foreground, a feature of many of his painted compositions. The distant view in the drawing was used by him for a painting now at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. The drawing belongs to a group of more than twenty sheets and eight paintings from the collection of Frits Markus, a Dutchman who lived in New York, which was bequeathed to the museum by his wife Rita.

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