An apple, grapes and a hazelnut on a mossy bank

William Henry Hunt

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Hunt worked mainly as a watercolorist and became renowned for his still lifes, which characteristically show natural elements such as birds’ nests, fruits, and nuts presented with a sense of heightened realism. This small, beautiful example centers on an apple with a distinctive flaw, a cluster of grapes, and a hazelnut still clad in its papery outer skin, all lying near a mossy bank. Hunt attended especially to the illusion of the surface qualities of these objects, while his approach to the background remained more suggestive. He rendered the powdery white bloom on the grapes with tiny dots of watercolor applied over a matte layer of Chinese white (zinc oxide), a technique that influenced a number of Pre-Raphaelite painters.

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