Midsummer Night's Dream

William Shakespeare

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A prolific German silhouette artist, Konewka designed illustrations for many British and American literary publications. Two of the most popular were Goethe's "Faust" and Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream, and contemporary printing techniques allowed his graceful images to be placed strategically as vignettes within the text.

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