Berry Pomeroy Castle in Devon

Francis Towne

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Towne’s composition focuses on a famous ruin and eighteenth-century tourist attraction. Berry Pomeroy Castle sits over a gorge of the river Dart, near Totnes, in Devonshire, its high position suggested by tiny figures that descend a steep lane at right. Greatest emphasis is given to crumbling walls overgrown with bushes and ivy. Unusually, the artist worked on this drawing in two, widely separated, stages. In the 1770s, he sketched the composition in graphite while at the site, then developed it with colored washes. Decades later he enriched it further, mixing his washes with gum to achieve effects comparable to oil.

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