Poems by Alfred Tennyson

Alfred Tennyson

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In 1857 Edward Moxon brought out a new edition of Tennyson’s Poems illustrated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and fellow Pre-Raphaelites William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. The first two artists created unconventional medievalist images to accompany poems they revered. Rossetti's illustration, created for the poem Sir Galahad, portrays King Arthur’s purest knight resting at a woodland shrine during his quest for the Holy Grail. In the poem, invisible mystical forces tend the shrine, but Rossetti represented female angels clustered beneath the altar, ringing a bell. George Somes Layard wrote in the nineteenth century that "Millais realised, Holman Hunt idealised, and Rossetti transcendentalized the subjects which they respectively illustrated."

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