View on the South Downs

John Martin

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

After achieving early success with Biblical and apocalyptic subjects, Martin turned briefly to English landscape in the eighteen-forties. This example allows us to examine his unique handling of watercolor and approach to nature, while also demonstrating an awareness of his contemporaries. The way bright patches of yellow are used to break up dark green foliage in the center distance, recalls Samuel Palmer's visionary treatment of oak woods near Shoreham a decade earlier. A pair of tiny figures lying on the grass in the foreground, demonstrate that Martin did not simply base this view on sketches, but instead constructed an imaginary, elevated viewpoint. Subtle distortions of scale and the inclusion of tiny details (visible only through magnification) lend the work a visionary quality–these details include a group of women dressed in white seated on the grass in the center distance, a windmill beyond the trees at right, and tiny trees lining the horizon.

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