Agia Paraskevi, Epirus, Greece

Agia Paraskevi, Epirus, Greece

Edward Lear

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Lear was a tireless traveler through Italy, Greece and the Middle East, making drawings that Arthur Stanley, dean of Westminster described as "topographical poetry." Between 1855 and 1857, he wintered in Corfu and made the present work during a three-week tour through northwestern Greece. The mountains were difficult to penetrate but the dramatic landscapes Lear discovered repaid the effort. Here he depicts a spectacular site behind the small church of Agia Paraskevi in the village of Drosopigi (Kantsiko). Sheer cliffs plunge down to a river gorge, snow-capped mountains are indicated in the distance, and Lear’s delight with the setting is suggested by his evocative notes at lower left on its distinctive sounds, "Nightingales, dim roar below." According to Lear’s biographer Vivian Noakes: "it was during the latter half of the 1850s...when [the artist] had given up hope of becoming a sought-after painter [in oils], that he produced his finest watercolours. He had achieved a masterly control of his medium, combining powerful composition with strong line and a fluid freedom in the handling of paint which would establish him as one of the great English watercolour painters."

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Agia Paraskevi, Epirus, GreeceAgia Paraskevi, Epirus, GreeceAgia Paraskevi, Epirus, GreeceAgia Paraskevi, Epirus, GreeceAgia Paraskevi, Epirus, Greece

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.