Boats off the coast, storm approaching

John Sell Cotman

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

As he approached fifty, Cotman abandoned oil painting after a number of his works failed to sell and instead refocused his ambitions on watercolor. This luminous seascape demonstrates his mature mastery of the medium. The fishing boat threatened by a storm may allude to the artist’s personal struggles, but more obviously it pays tribute to J. M. W. Turner’s famous painting Dutch Boats in a Gale (1801; National Gallery, London), as both works are centered on a sharply canted, golden-sailed fishing boat, distant warship, and looming clouds. More generally, Cotman is declaring his admiration for seventeenth-century Dutch seascapes while also demonstrating how watercolors can effectively convey effects of light and weather. To produce the milky, foam-topped waves, for example, he experimented with mixing flour paste into his washes.

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