Mill Near the Grand Chartreuse, Dauphiny, part XI, plate 54 from "Liber Studiorum"
Joseph Mallord William Turner
An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art
Turner distilled his ideas about landscape In "Liber Studiorum" (Latin for Book of Studies), a series of seventy prints plus a frontispiece published between 1807 and 1819. To establish the compositions, he made brown watercolor drawings, then usually etched the design onto a copper plate. In this case, Dawe is believed to have carried out that first step and then developed the tone with mezzotint, under Turner's direction. The artist had toured the mountains above Grenoble, France in 1802, and used sketches from that tour to develop this dramatic image of a narrow gorge, framed by cliffs and trees. At center, a thin wooden bridge spans the stream near a mill, and the letter "M" in the upper margin indicates Turner's category of Mountainous landscape.
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.