
At Nunnery in Cumberland
Joseph Farington
An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art
Farington was a leading landscape draftsman who had trained under Richard Wilson then, as a mature artist, traveled and sketched throughout Britain every summer. Aquatint series based on his designs include "Views of the Lakes in Cumberland and Westmorland" (1789), and "An History of the River Thames" (1794-1796), and helped to form the taste for picturesque landscape. As an academician, Farington’s active networking played an important part in the election of new members, a process detailed in his now famous diary, written between 1798 and 1817. This drawing of the River Croglin near Nunnery, the estate of the Aglionby family is an accomplished example of tinted drawing technique. Graphite under-drawing is overlaid with delicate blue and gray washes, used to define forms which are then detailed in pen and ink, a style derived Italian masters such as Canaletto, who lived in England for nearly a decade from 1746. Farington exhibited this drawing at the Royal Academy in 1790.
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.