A Rustic Country House
1850
Medium
Pen and black ink
Dimensions
5 3/8 x 4 1/8 in. (13.7 x 10.5 cm)
Classification
Drawings
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
The J.B. Neumann Collection, Gift of Dr. Franz H. Hirschland, 1951
Accession Number
51.504.5
Tags
Art Historical Context
Rodolphe Bresdin’s *A Rustic Country House* (1850) is a delicate pen-and-black-ink drawing that exemplifies the artist’s celebrated mastery of intricate line work. Measuring just over five by four inches, the small sheet invites intimate viewing, rewarding the eye with carefully hatched textures that suggest weathered wood, thatched roofing, and surrounding foliage. Bresdin, a French draftsman active in the mid-nineteenth century, often transformed ordinary rural subjects into quietly fantastical scenes through his obsessive attention to detail. Created during a period when many artists turne...
About the Artist
Rodolphe Bresdin · 1822–1885
Rodolphe Bresdin (1822–1885) was a visionary French draughtsman, engraver, and lithographer whose fantastical imagery captured the empathy of rural poverty and the wild exuberance of the imagination. Born on August 12, 1822, in Montrelais near Le Fresne-sur-Loire in Brittany, he grew up in the Breton countryside amid its bardic folklore traditions before a family dispute left him homeless in Paris...