Lakenham, Near Norwich

John Sell Cotman

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Bright sunlight casts the shadow of a small girl onto a cottage wall as she plays with a dog. The patches of plaster that have fallen away reveal patterned boards beneath and reflect Cotman’s delight in the decayed irregularity of old buildings. The rustic architectural forms also echo those in his earlier watercolor Farm Building by a Pond (ca. 1808–11), on view nearby. Here the soft-ground etching technique enabled him to adapt into print the tones and patterns characteristic of his graphite drawings.

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