View of the Cascades at Tivoli

Nicolas Delobel

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Delobel was a pupil of Louis de Boullogne and Nicolas Vleughels. When the latter was named Director of the Académie de France in Rome in 1724, Delobel accompanied him to Italy. Under Vleughels, the French students were encouraged to make plain air landscape drawings in the Roman campagna. The proposed drawing must have been made on one of these expeditions. This painterly study depicts the cascades at Tivoli. opting for a high horizon line, Delobel allows the buildings to occupy the upper band of the composition. Much of the sheet is given over to a description of the waterfall, rocky outcroppings, foliage, and ruins of this famous site, a short distance from Rome.

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