View of a colliery at the edge of a town

George Price Boyce

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This drawing describes a valley with coal mining machinery in the middle distance standing infront of houses, a church, and hill crowned by a castle. Colored washes use acid green, mauve, pink, dark green and brown to distinguish key forms, with graphite only applied to describe water running over rocks, and foreground flowers. On the basis of an inscription in the lower margin, this work was once attributed to John Ruskin. More recently, it has been connected to George Price Boyce who, from the mid-1860s, began to explore partially industrialized landscapes in County Durham in northeast England. In this he was encouraged by the ironmaster Isaac Lowthian Bell, a new patron.

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