Landscape with hills, a lake, and figures

Landscape with hills, a lake, and figures

William Gilpin

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Gilpin's ideas concering the picturesque are here demonstrated using monochrome ink washes. While working as the enlightened head of a boys's school, then vicar at Boldre in the New Forest from 1777, Gilpin wrote essays that defined this new aesthetic concept associated with pleasingly irregular forms situated between beauty and sublimity. During summer tours, Gilpin visited Wales, the Scottish Highlands and other remote corners of the Britain to seek picturesque sites, and his subsequent travelogues encouraged Britons to do likewise. When continental travel was restricted by two decades of war with France, a new form of tourism emerged centered on pleasing vistas rather than famous landmarks.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Landscape with hills, a lake, and figuresLandscape with hills, a lake, and figuresLandscape with hills, a lake, and figuresLandscape with hills, a lake, and figuresLandscape with hills, a lake, and figures

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.