The Castle above the Meadows, plate 8 from "Liber Studiorum, part II"

The Castle above the Meadows, plate 8 from "Liber Studiorum, part II"

Joseph Mallord William Turner

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Turner distilled his ideas about landscape In "Liber Studiorum" (Latin for Book of Studies), a series of seventy prints plus a frontispiece published between 1807 and 1819. To establish the compositions, he made brown watercolor drawings, etched outlines onto copper plates, then usually employed professional engravers to develop tone. Here we see his preliminary work on a plate that Charles Turner later completed in mezzotint. Meadows surround a a ruined castle on a rocky hill, and the foreground is enlivened by a boy piping near a herd of cows.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Castle above the Meadows, plate 8 from "Liber Studiorum, part II"The Castle above the Meadows, plate 8 from "Liber Studiorum, part II"The Castle above the Meadows, plate 8 from "Liber Studiorum, part II"The Castle above the Meadows, plate 8 from "Liber Studiorum, part II"The Castle above the Meadows, plate 8 from "Liber Studiorum, part II"

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.