Snowdon, after an April Hailstorm [or Snowdon through Clearing Clouds]

Alfred William Hunt

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Hunt’s reputation as an important Victorian landscape watercolorist is affirmed by this masterly depiction of Mount Snowdon, the highest mountain in Wales. We see the peak from the west, with a long ridge, Crib y Ddysgl, running to the north, storm clouds clinging to the southern flank, and light breaking through from the east. Likely stimulated by the fourth volume of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, subtitled Of Mountain Beauty (April 1856), Hunt worked on atmospheric landscapes in northwest Wales in 1856 and 1857. His treatment of changing weather conditions is unsurpassed. Veils of dark vapor dissipate at right to offer a glimpse of sun-dappled clouds, with the vista introduced in the foreground by lichen-flecked boulders that jut through golden turf.

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.