Frascati, near Rome

William Cowen

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Cowen made this delicately painted watercolor when he was twenty-two and it demonstrates the fresh vision British artists brought to landscape when they returned to the Continent after the Napoleonic wars. Frascati, twelve miles southeast of Rome, offered a prospect of the Alban hills framed by the Villa Lancellotti at right, and cathedral of San Pietro Apostolo at left. Long shadows cast by two umbrella pines indicate a rising sun at left. Cowen's travels were subsidized by Charles William Wentworth, third Earl Fitzwilliam, and other drawings from the trip are now at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. While recognizable landmarks are included, the artist gave greater attention to delicate shifting colors in the sky, and the way low light transforms architectural forms into abstracted planes. Foreground details are set against shadows still cloaking the plain and distant hills.

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