The Abbatial House, Abbey of St. Ouen, Rouen

John Sell Cotman

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

On three trips to Normandy between 1817 and 1820 Cotman planned a series of etchings focused on French medieval architecture. His imaginative reconstruction of the Abbey of St. Ouen, which had been demolished in 1815–16 to enlarge Rouen’s town square, was likely stimulated by local distress over that loss. He transformed what had been an enclosed courtyard into a garden facade, enlivening the scene with figures in seventeenth-century costume. The imagery derives from engravings in J. F. de Pommeraye’s Histoire de l’Abbaye Royale de St. Ouen (1662), owned by Cotman’s English patron, Dawson Turner. Declaring the Abbey of St. Ouen "the best subject I ever touched on," Cotman exhibited four versions of it between 1824 and 1831; this one likely dates late in the series.

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