The Convalescent (A Portrait of the Artist's Wife)

Ford Madox Brown

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

As Brown’s mistress in the late 1840s, Emma Hill (1829–1890) was a favorite model, but after their 1853 marriage, alcoholism affected her appearance. When he made this pastel, the artist wrote, “Now that she is lying in bed thinned with the fever she looks very pictorial and young as ever again.” Older than the founding Pre-Raphaelites, Brown sympathized with their agenda and was particularly close to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Echoing the latter’s sensibility, he here added a sensual quality to a meditation on life’s fragility. Emma is shown holding a bunch of pansies or violets. In the autumn of 1872, following the wedding of Cathy, her twenty-two year old daughter, to German musicologist Franz Hueffer, Emma succumbed to an infection and became dangerously ill. The artist made this work during her long recovery. There are two nearly identical versions of the drawing, the other in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, UK.

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