Gardens of the Villa d'Este at Tivoli

Charles Joseph Natoire

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Director of the French Academy in Rome from 1751 to 1775, Natoire taught many young French artists, including Hubert Robert and Jean Honoré Fragonard. During this period he received occasional commissions for paintings but increasingly devoted his time to landscape drawings, often worked up in watercolor. The Villa d’Este in Tivoli, outside Rome, was a favorite destination for Natoire and his students, popular for its dramatic vistas featuring fountains and statues set amid lush foliage. In this example, we see the Fountain of the Water Organ flanked by trees, with a cascade falling below. Invented figures enliven the foreground.

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