Study for Facing the Enemy (from McGuire Scrapbook)

Francis William Edmonds

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The present work, inscribed by the artist “Facing the Enemy,” is a study for the painting of the same title (Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia) that Edmonds exhibited in New York at the National Academy of Design in 1845. Both the drawing and the painting portray a carpenter in his shop, seated precariously tilted back on a side chair as he contemplates a decanter of spirits on the windowsill before him. The painting was engraved and distributed with a sermonizing circular by the Temperance Society in 1847, in the heat of the mid-nineteenth-century sobriety movement.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art