Landscape with a tree in the foreground

Raphael Lamar West

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Born and raised in London, Raphael Lamar West assisted his famous father Benjamin West, and became a skilled painter and draftsman in his own right. This drawing comes from a group that descended in the artist’s family, with the pen work and knotted central tree trunk close in style to known works by Raphael.

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