Peat Bog, Scotland (Liber Studiorum, part IX, plate 45)

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, then etched outlines onto copper plates. Professional engravers usually developed the tone under Turner's direction, and Clint here added aquatint and mezzotint in masterly fashion to evoke strands of mist and rain clouds shrouding an ancient peat bog backed by mountains. Men in the foreground men cut turf and load a sledge pulled by a white horse. The distinctly Turnerian imagery derives from sketches made in Scotland, and the evocative image is one of the finest in the set. The letter "M" in the upper margin indicates Turner's category of Mountainous landscape.

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