Frontispiece from "Liber Studiorum"

Frontispiece from "Liber Studiorum"

Joseph Mallord William Turner

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Turner created this print to introduce his "Liber Studiorum" (Latin for Book of Studies), a series of seventy prints published between 1807 and 1819 that span the range of landscape's thematic potential. The artist etched and engraved the central image of Zeus transformed into a white bull as he abducts Princess Europa from Tyre, using the scene to symbolize Historical and Mountainous landscape. Easling added mezzotint to the border whose imagery refers to Turner's other categories: vegetation and a basket of eggs refer to Pastoral landscape; fish, oars and a sail suggest Marines, and a low-relief arcade stands for Architectural landscape. Turner's EP category (an abbreviation he never defined in print, but likely intended to indicate Elevated Pastoral) is evoked by classical ruins and a white peacock.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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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.