Fortified entrance to a Welsh town (East gate of Caernarvon)

John Varley

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Varley’s early mastery of watercolor is beautifully demonstrated in this response to the massive east gate of Caernarvon, a walled castle and town in North Wales. In 1802, the artist toured the region for a second time with his brother Cornelius. Two years later he joined the Society of Painters in Water-Colours—formed to raise the medium’s status—and may have exhibited this drawing there in 1805 as "View of Carnarvon Walls." In the first decade of the nineteenth century, the Napoleonic Wars kept British artists from traveling on the Continent and encouraged them to seek new material on their own islands.

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