The House of York

Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Loutherbourg earned considerable success in the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture before moving in 1771 to England, where he became a prolific designer of theater sets as well as a history painter. He also produced several drawings representative of noble houses for David Hume’s History of England (1790s). In this dramatic still-life composition, illustrating the House of York, he scattered the anatomical fragments of an armored knight among symbols of the ill-fated York family, including a white rose and the heraldic boar of King Richard III, who died on the battlefield during the War of the Roses in 1485. The white tragedy mask in the foreground alludes to Shakespeare’s 1592 play Richard III and to Loutherbourg’s own connections to the theater.

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