View of Lake Como

Francis Towne

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Towne traveled to Italy in 1780–81 and experimented with watercolor in ways that influenced the medium’s expressive development. As he headed home via the Italian lakes, he made these studies, dated August 27, from a boat on Lake Como, leaving fingerprints in the wet pigment along the lower edge of one sheet, its composition centered on a sunlit hillside backed by distant mountains. The other work is more claustrophobic, showing sheer gray cliffs plunging into the lake before the cloud-topped peak named Monte Legnone. The abstracted quality of Towne’s work results from patches of subtly modulated watercolor edged with lines of ink. Other sheets from the related sketchbook are preserved at Tate Britain and the Yale Center for British Art.

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