Leith Hill from Broadmoor, Surrey

Edmund George Warren

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Warren was one of the first to apply Pre-Raphaelite principles to watercolor landscapes. The year he made this work, a critic in the Athenaeum described him as an artist "who painted what he saw . . . [and] loved an English lane or wood-side . . . water bright, flashing and sheeny, and grass green, rain-beaten or wind-shaken." The compelling composition centers on a pond below Leith Hill, the highest point in southwest England. To help distinguish water from sky, the artist represented an orange-billed duck pursuing a dragonfly and rippling the reflective surface. Floating weeds behind give way to textured foliage growing over a rising slope, with Leith Hill Tower at the crest acting as a small punctuation point to direct the eye toward mottled clouds.

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