The Music Master

William Allingham

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Rossetti’s first published illustration was made for this volume to accompany the poem The Maids of Elfin-mere. Characteristically, the image focuses on a vision of three maidens who appear nightly to spin and chant, entrancing a pastor’s son who, “listening to their gentle singing, felt his heart go from him clinging, round these maids of Elfen-Mere.” Allingham, who wrote the related ballad, was an Irish poet known for fairy subjects. The stiff drapery and repeated poses in the image derive from late Gothic art, while the girls resemble Rossetti’s beloved Elizabeth Siddal. Edward Burne-Jones, a close friend of Rossetti's, called the related design “the most beautiful drawing for an illustration I have ever seen.”

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