The Woodcutter's Breakfast (The Faggot Gatherer's Meal)

William Henry Hunt

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Hunt's meticulous genre and still life subjects prefigure the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's emphasis on meticulous detail. This work displays the artist's mature mastery of watercolor, admiringly described by his pupil John Ruskin in "The Elements of Drawing" (1857). To create this image, Hunt stippled a white gouache ground using broken touches of watercolor and extensive passages of scraping to create bold effects of light and texture. His intense, realistic vision of British rural life focuses on an unadorned cottage interior where a humble figure rests on a bench. The distinct textures of the brick fireplace, rough flagstones, simple furniture, earthenware pot, iron kettle, and piled branches are all lovingly recorded.

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