View of the Villa Lante on the Janiculum in Rome

John Robert Cozens

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Like many eighteenth-century British artists, John Robert Cozens traveled to Italy to sketch the landscape. Working en plein air—typically in graphite or black chalk—he captured the essential forms, then colored his sketches with watercolor washes either on the spot, in his Italian lodgings, or sometimes upon his return to Britain. Cozens made this watercolor of the Villa Lante, on the Janiculum hill outside the ancient walls of Rome, for William Beckford, the wealthy author, collector, and aesthete whom he accompanied to Italy in 1782–83. By omitting hard outlines, blotting brushstrokes, and articulating details of foliage and architecture with delicate touches of color, the artist achieved a soft, luminous effect. The low viewpoint causes the buildings to appear dramatically silhouetted against the sky, and reveals an interest in the aesthetic category of the Sublime. The evocative, atmospheric style of Cozens's finest watercolors inspired the following generation of artists, and prompted John Constable, in 1835, to describe his predecessor as "the greatest genius that ever touched landscape."

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