Landscape with Rocks in a River (near Kronau?)

Eduard Peithner von Lichtenfels

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In this rapidly drawn sheet, von Lichtenfels, a landscape specialist who taught the genre at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, renders a riverscape as a dazzling pattern of line, color, and light. Gray shadows contrast with the warm tones of yellow and orange. Rather than apply pigment to the river, the artist focuses on the shadows cast on and by the rocks that breach its surface. In an inscription a previous owner identified this view as a site near the town of Kronau in southwestern Germany.

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