A Country Girl at Surrentum

Allan Ramsay

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Ramsay was a leading British portraitist considered particularly sympathetic to female subjects. Repeated visits to France and Italy refined the artist’s draftsmanship, and he made this study in 1776 after spending a summer at a spa on Ischia, near Naples, where he received treatment for an arm injury. By September he was sufficiently recovered to make several red chalk drawings, including this sensitive study of an Italian girl at Sorrento. The sensual treatment of neck and cheek, combined with unfocused gaze and simple dress, encapsulates the naturalism of Ramsay’s late style, while the pose in profile and Latinized place name of Surrentum—inscribed on the verso—evoke the classical past.

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