A Stand of Trees

Louis Cabat

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Cabat trained with Camille Flers, a founding member of the Barbizon school, and through his example, developed a practice of working outdoors in nature in the early 1830s. This drawing dates from Cabat’s first visit to Italy in 1836−37. The Umbrian town of Narni, inscribed on this sheet, provided fertile ground for landscape drawing and the artist returned the following year to make more studies of the area. In this sketch, he focused on the shapes of the tree trunks and branches; the small figure standing amidst them offers a sense of scale. Cabat later served as director of the French Academy in Rome from 1879 to 1884.

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