Cattle resting in a mountainous landscape, Bengal

George Chinnery

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In 1802 Chinnery left London for India to seek portrait commissions. After landing in Madras, he moved on to Calcutta and then to Dacca in southeast Bengal (now Dhaka, Bangladesh), where the British East India Company had established a station. Arriving in 1808, Chinnery stayed with his friend Sir Charles D’Oyly, the company’s representative. When not painting portraits, the artist sketched the local scenery and gave watercolor lessons to his host, who became the first owner of the present drawing. Chinnery must have traveled inland to find this mountain subject. Cattle rest before peaks defined by golden washes, and the middle ground is punctuated by a glowing point of fire and drifting smoke.

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