Valle Crucis Abbey, Denbighshire

Paul Sandby

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This watercolor ranks among Sandby's largest, placing the picturesque ruins of the Cistercian abbey of Valle Crucis in the background, and devoting greater attention to a herd of Welsh long-horned cattle that drink from a stream. Framing trees contrast healthy young trunks with a decaying arborial patriarch to evoke the life cycle. Narrative action comes from two milkmaids, one of whom stands with full buckets on a small bridge in the left foreground as her companion runs from a bull in the field. Sandby applied monochrome washes and pen and ink, then added touches of color to accentuate animals and figures.

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