Arcadian Landscape with Three Figures at a Lake

Johann Christian Reinhart

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Reinhart made this imposing drawing in Rome in 1792, when he and another leading German artist from the period, Joseph Anton Koch, started making "heroic" or "poetic" landscapes inspired as much by the Roman campagna as by the work of their seventeenth-century predecessors Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, and Gaspard Dughet. Although the figures are dressed in a style that hints at a specific mythological or historical subject, they were probably used merely to indicate the antique setting of the landscape, as were the villa in the left background and the funerary monuments at center and in the right background. The dense composition and regular hatching are typical of Reinhart's manner throughout his career. The drawing is related to a painting he made in 1796 (Museum Georg Schäfer, Schweinfurt), but it cannot be called preparatory, for it differs from the painting in many ways. Fully signed and dated, and preserved in what is likely to be its original frame, the drawing was made as an independent work of art.

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