Woodcutters at Park Place, Henley, the river Thames beyond

Woodcutters at Park Place, Henley, the river Thames beyond

William Havell

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A blue-tinged rendering of the distant Thames anchors Havell’s watercolor of a scene near Henley—a view created when an estate owner cut a new road through the woods. Men working on a felled tree and a woman resting in the sun with her baby enliven the foreground. In 1827 Havell exhibited this work at the Old Watercolour Society’s annual London exhibition, signaling his reengagement with the English landscape after a spending a decade in China and India. Tinged with autumnal colors, the trees indicate the changing seasons, while water from a recent rain sparkles along a track in the road. This device directs our eyes toward the distant Thames and reminds of the underlying natural rhythms that sustain the landscape. Havell used both scratching and applied touches of gouache to create the highlights that help define water, cloth, and bark.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Woodcutters at Park Place, Henley, the river Thames beyondWoodcutters at Park Place, Henley, the river Thames beyondWoodcutters at Park Place, Henley, the river Thames beyondWoodcutters at Park Place, Henley, the river Thames beyondWoodcutters at Park Place, Henley, the river Thames beyond

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.