Study of a tree

Study of a tree

George Richmond

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This fresh watercolor study of foliage may have been made during a family holiday to Guildford (a similar landscape of Mickleham Downs, now at Eton College, is dated 1848 and inscribed “Sketched in company with my dear friend Samuel Palmer”). Palmer and Richmond had been close since the 1820s and the present watercolor recalls nature studies both made during their heady Shoreham days as young unmarried members of “The Ancients.”

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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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.