Mêr de Glace, Valley of Chamouni-Savoy (Liber Studiorum, part X, plate 50)

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. This is one of the few instances where he made the preliminary etched lines, then developed the tone, using mezzotint to detail an image of glacier developed from sketches made in Switzerland near the St. Gothard pass. Working experimentally, he rocked only part of the plate to create the darks, rather than following conventional mezzotint practice, where the plate is rocked completely, and highlights creates by scraping and burnishing. The "M" in the upper margin refers to 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