Barking Timber in Wychwood Forest, Oxfordshire

Joshua Cristall

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Cristall’s considerable achievements as a watercolorist were largely forgotten after his death until he was rediscovered in 1950 by a leading art historian, who affirmed his significant stylistic influence on John Sell Cotman. A focus on the human figure sets the artist apart from watercolorist contemporaries, and this example demonstrates an abiding interest in themes of rural work. He encountered these bark workers in Wychwood Forest in Oxfordshire and shows them stripping bark from felled oaks to produce a product needed to tan leather. While Cristall was aware of precedents in the work of Thomas Gainsborough and George Morland, he gives the comely young woman at the center of this composition a new nobility and avoids sentimentality, or any sense of narrative.

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