Journey Home

David Cox

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In this sweeping view across an English plain, market women move away from us towards a distantly glimpsed coastline. Bright colors distinguish the dress of women travellers who pass near men who plow a field with a team of horses. Overhead, dark clouds and circling gulls signal approaching rain. Cox was born in Birmingham and moved to London in 1804 to study with John Varley. In 1813–14 he published a "Treatise on Landscape Painting and Effect in Watercolours." After a period of financial struggle occasioned by the ecomomic depression that followed the Napoleonic Wars, the artist found success from the late eighteen-twenties and became one of Britain's leading landscape painters. He exhibited works, such as "Journey Home," at the Society of Painters in Water Colours and found appreciative patrons that supported his distinct vision.

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