The Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions, and Politics

Rudolph Ackermann, London

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

40 volume set, each volume contains six monthly issues. Illustrations devoted to series that include furniture, ladies' fashion, views of London emporiums, views of English country houses (exteriors), foreign views of cities and the alps, game hunting, samples of British made textiles, and embroidery patterns. Each volume approximately 380 pages, followed by annoucements of dividends and bankrupcies, meteorolgical charts, sometimes by advertisements, extra insertions, and indexes.

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