A landscape with an old oak (or beech) tree

Joseph Mallord William Turner

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This watercolour relates to a group that Turner painted at or near Norbury Park, Surrey in the mid seventeen-nineties. The young artist had been commissioned to paint an image of the fern house at Norbury by William Lock (1732–1810) and exhibited a related watercolor at the Royal Academy in 1798. Lock, himself a keen amateur artist, had employed Thomas Sandby to build Norbury Park in the late 1770s and commissioned George Barret to carry out the decorations. A prominent single old large tree stands at the center of the drawing in an open park, with additional trees beyond. A windmill is seen in the center distance, below the branches with sheep lying at the edge of the grass.

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