Bonchurch Downs

John Brett

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Precise natural details convey a dreamlike stillness in this Isle of Wight landscape, painted in the month of December. A sharply canted section of coastal down allows Brett to contrast purplish-gray rocks with pale grass and rusty winter foliage, as dappled touches of brilliant color describe a patch of distant sea. Wandering cows and a signal mast silhouetted against the sky suggest an unseen human presence. Brett was associated with the Pre-Raphaelites, and his early career had been molded by the leading critic John Ruskin, who acted as his mentor until a scientific argument caused a rift in 1865. While painted shortly after their parting, Bonchurch Downs still honors Ruskin’s famous advice that artists should "go to Nature in all singleness of heart . . . rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing."

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