The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems

Christina Georgina Rossetti

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Following the publication of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market in 1862, Dante Gabriel Rossetti helped launch his sister’s second volume of poetry. The Prince’s Progress tells of a princess awaiting the return of her tarrying prince. These illustrations allude to the beginning and the end of the tale. The title-page image shows a confined figure gazing out a window into an empty walled garden. The frontispiece shows the prince arriving, after a series of temptations and self-indulgences, only to find that the princess has died. After 1851 Rossetti stopped exhibiting at the Royal Academy, so his work was known to the public mostly through illustrations.

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