Beaumaris Mount, near Bangor, Wales

William Collingwood

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This moody nocturne centers on Beaumaris, a coastal town on the Welsh island of Anglesey. A scraped point of light on the shore, reflected in the sea, brings into resolution the washy layers applied to evoke water, land, and sky. A flare shooting into the darkness, created with white gouache, adds a further note of punctuation. Collingwood was twenty-four in 1843 when he painted this sheet, using techniques learned from the landscape painters James Duffield Harding and Samuel Prout. His choice of subject pays tribute to J. M. W. Turner’s famous series of watercolors devoted to British harbors and coasts.

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