Farmhouse on the Slope of a Hill (c. 1508): Art, History and Details

Farmhouse on the Slope of a Hill (c. 1508) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Fra Bartolommeo (Italian, 1472–1517).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This is a significant early example of pure landscape drawing in Europe, as it is dedicated completely to the depiction of nature for its own sake, without suggestion of a biblical or historical narrative. The rapidity and regularity of strokes used for the evergreen and deciduous trees and the sweeping lines in the foreground suggest that the landscape in Farmhouse on the Slope of a Hill was made directly from nature. The sheet comes from an album of 41 landscape studies by Fra Bartolommeo assembled by an eighteenth-century collector and disbound for sale in the mid-20th century. A member of the Dominican Order, Fra Bartolomeo likely produced these drawings during his travels in and around Florence, often to Dominican establishments.

Object facts

• Title: Farmhouse on the Slope of a Hill
• Date: c. 1508
• Creator attribution: Fra Bartolommeo (Italian, 1472–1517)
• Culture: Italy, Florence
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: pen and brown ink
• Dimensions: Sheet: 22.3 x 29.4 cm (8 3/4 x 11 9/16 in.); Secondary Support: 27.5 x 41.2 cm (10 13/16 x 16 1/4 in.)
• Collection: DR - Italian
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1957.498

A detail from the museum

The artist who made this drawing, Fra (brother) Bartolommeo, left his successful Florentine artistic studio in 1500 and renounced painting in order to join the Dominican Order.

Collection credit

Gift of the Hanna Fund, Purchase, Dudley P. Allen Fund, Delia E. Holden Fund and L. E. Holden Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Joachim, Harold, and Suzanne Folds McCullagh. Italian Drawings in the Art Institute of Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.
• Jeudwine, W. R. "Fine Works on the Market: A Volume of Landscape Drawings by Fra Bartolommeo." Apollo 66 (November 1957): 132-135.
• Sotheby & Co. "Catalogue of Drawings of Landscapes and Trees by Fra Bartolommeo." (November 1957).

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.