Wooded Landscape with Figures by a Pond

Hendrik Gerrit ten Cate

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This is a beautiful, early drawing by the early nineteenth-century landscape painter Hendrick Gerritsz ten Cate. He depicted a wood with two travelers heading into the distance on the left. While the part depicted on the left looks like deep forest, a small fence on the right brings the viewer back to civilization. The focus of the landscape is the pair of trees in the center which he masterfully rendered with layers of gray and black washes to evoke the dappled light that falls on the trunk and the leaves. Ten Cate's technique here is unusual in that he used black chalk not just as an underdrawing but also to provide an added layer of definition over the wash - he created with it texture on the bark of the tree and accentuated the forms of the leaves.

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