A Waterfall in Switzerland (near Lausanne?) with a Resting Wayfarer

A Waterfall in Switzerland (near Lausanne?) with a Resting Wayfarer

Jan Hackaert

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This view of a waterfall is one of numerous drawings Hackaert produced during, or just after, his travels in Switzerland between 1653 and 1656. (An inscription, probably added in the eighteenth century, locates the scene near Lausanne.) Short vertical strokes describe the cascading water. Two figures—one seated in the foreground and another climbing the hill above—provide a sense of scale. Hackaert may well have produced the drawing for a collector. Other examples of Hackaert’s Swiss views were acquired by Laurens van der Hem (1621-1678) and incorporated into the collector's extraordinary atlas preserved in the Österreichhische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A Waterfall in Switzerland (near Lausanne?) with a Resting WayfarerA Waterfall in Switzerland (near Lausanne?) with a Resting WayfarerA Waterfall in Switzerland (near Lausanne?) with a Resting WayfarerA Waterfall in Switzerland (near Lausanne?) with a Resting WayfarerA Waterfall in Switzerland (near Lausanne?) with a Resting Wayfarer

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.