A Prospect of Westminster & A Prospect of the City of London

A Prospect of Westminster & A Prospect of the City of London

Johannes Kip

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Two engravings, printed from two plates on four sheets, show a prospect of the cities of Westminster and London seen from the south bank of the river Thames. In this dual city view, Kip depicts London and Westminster at a key moment of urban development, when the nation’s capital started to assume the grandeur and cosmopolitan ideals for which it is known today. The dome of Sir Christopher Wren’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, finished just ten years earlier, proudly dominates the skyline of the city, and the busy river in the foreground illustrates the importance of trade to the cities’ development. The most important buildings in the two skylines have been numbered and identified in legends printed below. Kip and his partner Leonard Knyff were arguably the most important topographical printmakers of the era. The fact that the titles were translated into French and Latin as well, reflects the ambitions of the British print market, which no longer just followed and collected what was produced on the Continent, but played an active part in it, and aimed to compete at a level of equal quality.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A Prospect of Westminster & A Prospect of the City of LondonA Prospect of Westminster & A Prospect of the City of LondonA Prospect of Westminster & A Prospect of the City of LondonA Prospect of Westminster & A Prospect of the City of LondonA Prospect of Westminster & A Prospect of the City of London

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.