The east end of Rievaulx Abbey, Yorkshire

John Sell Cotman

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Cotman’s innovations reshaped watercolor painting in Britain and expanded the medium’s aesthetic potential. Born in Norwich, northeast of London, the artist relocated to the capital between 1798 and 1806, traveling and sketching in the summers. This moody image of the Gothic abbey at Rievaulx relates to a Yorkshire tour of 1803. By Cotman’s day, the ruins of Rievaulx—one of the Catholic institutions dissolved by Henry VIII when he broke from Rome in 1534—sheltered cattle and, for the artist, evoked the transience of human endeavor. Technically, the drawing demonstrates how, even early in his career, Cotman transformed architectural and natural forms into arresting two-dimensional patterns.

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