The West Wind, Lynmouth

Sir Edward John Poynter

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Coastal cliffs in North Devon sweep away to the west, with sandbanks in the middle-distance marking the outflow of the river Lyn into the Bristol Channel. A green expanse above denotes Exmoor. The artist’s scraping creates lines of breaking surf, and the scale of the watery expanse is emphasized by a tiny steamboat threatened by curtains of rain. At the horizon, the sun breaks through clouds to cast pink reflections across the sea. Poynter, a leading academic painter known for realistic evocations of ancient Rome and biblical subjects, practiced watercolor mostly for his own pleasure. This work was bought by his brother-in-law, the politician Alfred Baldwin, who lent it to important exhibitions at Vienna (1873), the Grosvenor Gallery (1877), and the Fine Art Society (1903).

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