By Candlelight

Julian Alden Weir

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Gentle features, softly drawn, mark the serious countenance. Dense repetitions of fine lines trace the wide eyes and sensual lips of the artist's wife, Anna (who appears in a drawing exhibited nearby.) She sits opposite her husband at a table, glancing down and slightly away, her hands clasped lightly in a gesture resembling prayer. Behind her high-backed chair, an antique cabinet marked by turnings and carved panels-a sign of the woman's Yankee pedigree, and of her husband's refined taste-emerges from the darkness.

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