A Lion (A Lion Resting on a Rock)

George Stubbs

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Stubbs was eighteenth-century Britain’s greatest animal painter and a skilled etcher, an unusual combination of artistic skills for that period. The artist’s renderings of big cats generally are set in dark wooded settings; however, here, the lushly maned lion lies on a clifftop overlooking the sea. Distant palm trees evoke the animal’s native North African habitat, which the artist never visited. To study the lion’s form, Stubbs likely went to either the menagerie at the Tower of London or the one on Hounslow Heath maintained by Lord Shelbourne. The lion’s pose and expression convey his traditional status as king of beasts.

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