Design Sketches for a Memorial Library (recto and verso) (possibly the Winn Memorial Library, Woburn, Massachusetts)

Henry Hobson Richardson

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Sketches on both sides of this sheet may record Richardson's preliminary ideas for the Winn Memorial Library, Woburn, Massachusetts, built 1876–79. As one of America's most influential nineteenth-century architects, the designer developed a style known as Richardsonian Romanesque, demonstrated most famously in Trinity Church, Boston. Developed sketches on the recto of the present sheet use pointed Gothic arches, however, which the clients then rejected. As built, the library uses rounded arched windows and colonnades and remains true to Richardson's signature style.

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