A classical landscape

A classical landscape

Jean-Baptiste-Claude Chatelain

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

One of the finest imaginative draftsmen working in London in the mid-eighteenth century, Chatelain was also a skilled etcher. This classically composed landscape is executed mostly in ink and brown wash, with blue touches applied to the water and a distant hill. A central river leads the eye to a distant bay, framed by a large large tree at right and a series of steep receding cliffs at left. The artist's admiration for the French landscape painter Claude is evident, and it is not surprising that Chatelain worked with Francis Vivares to produce one of the first prints after Claude to be published in England ("A Dance Under the Trees", or "Landscape with Rural Dance," 1743).

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.