Arab School

John Frederick Lewis

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Lewis lived in Cairo for a decade, adopting local dress and customs and making drawings that record aspects of Egyptian life. He took this sheet back to London in 1851 and used it to develop an exhibited watercolor, Interior of a School, Cairo (1865, Victoria and Albert Museum). The artist responds to the routine of a Qur'an classroom, centering his sketch on a boy who prepares to recite for a bearded Hoja or teacher. Lewis describes faces and turbans, but indicates the setting broadly and uses the brown paper–now darkened–to suggest unadorned walls and floor, and to provide a base for quickly brushed costume elements and wood grain of the teacher's desk. In contrast to the artist's elaborately detailed finished watercolors, this study demonstrates his rapid, informal use of the medium.

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