Cattle and sheep at resting at the edge of a forest

Cattle and sheep at resting at the edge of a forest

George Barret, the younger

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Barret joined his teacher, John Varley as a founding member of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1805. The institution promoted watercolor as a medium whose subtlety and range could approximate oil, and Barret would show over six hundred works in their annual London exhibitions during his long career. He developed a type of romantic-classical landscape anchored by rustic elements such as the herdsmen that here tend cattle before a distant castle. The golden tonality echoes the varnished oil paintings of the seventeenth-century landscapist Claude Lorrain, but Barret described trees in a singular manner, mixing gum arabic with watercolor and using a resist method to create textured branches and globular foliage. This mature work likely dates close to the end of the artist’s life.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Cattle and sheep at resting at the edge of a forestCattle and sheep at resting at the edge of a forestCattle and sheep at resting at the edge of a forestCattle and sheep at resting at the edge of a forestCattle and sheep at resting at the edge of a forest

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.