The Town of Beccles from the Bridge, Suffolk

John Sell Cotman

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Between 1811 and 1823 Cotman lived in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, where he designed and etched several series of prints. Longman & Company commissioned this drawing of the market town of Beccles, on the Waveney River, to illustrate Excursions in the County of Suffolk (1818–19). For his contributions to the project, which one critic has dubbed "topography turned high art," Cotman used ink lines and washes with masterful economy to distill the view; repeated forms of trees and boats frame the river and indicate recession. On the distant slope, terraced houses are lightly indicated and do not distract from the fourteenth-century church of St. Michael, reduced by the artist to a silhouette pierced by tiny lights and accentuated by diagonal rays in the sky.

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