The Moat Island, Windsor Great Park

Thomas Sandby

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Thomas Sandby, and his brother Paul, helped to establish watercolor as a nuanced and expressive medium associated with British art. Both worked as military surveyors until 1746, when Thomas was appointed deputy ranger of Windsor Great Park by the duke of Cumberland, George III’s younger brother. This composition resembles the artist’s designs for Eight Views of Windsor (1754–55), a set of etchings. Mote (or Moat) Park is crossed by two tributaries of the Bourne Ditch, whose fortified meeting point lends the location its name. Graphite lines were applied freely on site, then developed with colored washes that sometimes ignore sketched elements. Cows and sheep dot a lawn bordered by trees before a distant body of water.

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