Harlech Castle across the Traeth Mawr
John Varley
An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art
As a founding member of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours, Varley promoted the medium’s range and capabilities at the organization’s annual London exhibitions, while simultaneously influencing a generation of young artists as a teacher. In this scene of the Welsh coast at low tide, he uses broad, flat washes to delineate sand, water, and sky. Varley and John Cotman had developed this technique together as members of an informal sketching society beginning in 1802, and the motif of a clouded sky opening to reveal a patch of distant blue appears frequently in Varley’s watercolors made between 1805 and 1810.
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.