Newcastle at Night from the Rabbit Banks, Gateshead

Newcastle at Night from the Rabbit Banks, Gateshead

George Price Boyce

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This moody evening view across the Tyne responds to an industrial city northeast of London. St. Nicholas Cathedral emerges from the haze at left as flames from factory chimneys create multiple points of light. Boyce joined London’s Old Water-Colour Society, formally the Society of Painters in Water-Colours, in 1865 and there showed a variation of this subject, attracting the attention of the Athenaeum. A reviewer noted that, "Among the recently elected members of this Society, by far the most original artist in landscape is Mr. Boyce, who treats with such perfect solemnity, beauty, richness and truth of colouring, some of the most commonplace themes . . . a distant view of a manufacturing town interests us in its million lives and fortunes; its . . . glowing sky looks full of prophecy."

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Newcastle at Night from the Rabbit Banks, GatesheadNewcastle at Night from the Rabbit Banks, GatesheadNewcastle at Night from the Rabbit Banks, GatesheadNewcastle at Night from the Rabbit Banks, GatesheadNewcastle at Night from the Rabbit Banks, Gateshead

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.