
Mountain Path with a Tree
Friedrich Nerly
An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art
This sheet exhibits a remarkably free and expressive use of watercolor to capture a wooded landscape animated by wind and shifting light. Applied wet-on-wet, the colors bleed together, suggesting a murky tangle of damp foliage and brush from which rises a twisting tree, its branches spiraling upward. At lower left, blades of grass are reflected in the glassy surface of a brook. Trained in Hamburg, Nerly spent almost his entire career in Italy. This sheet probably dates from his early years in Germany or his time in Rome, before he settled in Venice in 1837.
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.