The Entombment

Sir Edward Burne-Jones

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Burne-Jones conveys deep emotion in this design for George Howard, 9th Earl of Carlisle. When the earl’s father died in 1879, he planned a monument to his parents, Mary and Charles Wentworth Howard, at Lanercost Priory, Cumbria. A bronze Nativity plaque commemorated his mother, who died in 1834 after giving birth to her son, and an Entombment honored his father. For the latter, a confined space filled with curving forms encloses the mourners and expresses a profound sense of grief, at once Christian and universal. The sculptor Sir Joseph Edgar Boehm (1834–1890) translated the designs into bronze.

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