The Young Family

Lorenz Frølich

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Frølich built an international career as an illustrator. With the publisher and author Pierre-Jules Hetzel, he produced a popular series of children’s books featuring the adventures of Mademoiselle Lili, based on his own daughter Edma. The artist first studied drawing under Martinus Rørbye, Christen Købke, and C. W. Eckersberg in Denmark before traveling extensively in Germany, Italy, and France, where he settled for an extended period, spending a year in the studio of Thomas Couture. While in London during the Franco-Prussian War, he contributed these illustrations to Eliza Tabor’s book "When I Was a Little Girl: Stories for Children," published by Macmillan in 1871. These were among the first Danish drawings to enter The Met collection.

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