Bath of Venus

Sir Edward Burne-Jones

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Burne-Jones made a painting of "The Bath of Venus" between 1873 and 1878 (Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon), and here seems to have returned to the subject at a later date. The artist experimented with metallic pigments on colored papers in his last decade, and this example appeared in the posthumous sale of his studio in 1898, and was acquired by the Museum in 1908.

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