Portrait of a man

Thomas Frye

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Frye moved to London from Ireland in his twenties to work as a portrait and miniature painter. In 1744 he co-founded the Bow porcelain works, managing the enterprise until 1760, when ill health forced him to stop. He devoted his remaining years to creating dramatic mezzotint portraits, the first set of twelve described in the Public Advertiser of 1760 as "in the manner of Piazzetta, drawn from Nature and as large as life." This drawing likely was made in preparation for a mezzotint (unrealized) and shows a man from behind looking at a board or framed canvas. His right hand supports his chin, causing a ruffled cuff to splay out and allowing Frye to create a delicate visual interplay between passages of white and dark chalk.

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