Woodland Scene

Pieter George Westenberg

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Sunlight filters through a forest’s canopy, casting shadows along the dirt road in the foreground and creating warm, light-filled gaps that draw the viewer further into the scene. The large scale and masterful treatment of light is unusual for Westenberg, a painter better known for his views of Dutch city streets and interiors. The artist likely originally sketched the scene in black chalk out in nature and then completed the sheet with gray ink and wash in the studio. An inscription on the verso suggests that it depicts the Haagse Bos, one of the oldest remaining forested areas in the Netherlands. Westenberg initialed and dated the drawing on the tree to the left as though the marks had been carved into its trunk.

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