Songs of Shakespeare

Songs of Shakespeare

Harriette Charlotte Hoskyns Abrahall

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

One page of this lovely illustrated book is devoted to a song from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (act 2, scene 2) crooned by Titania’s fairy attendants to lull their queen to sleep. Hedgehogs, spotted snakes, newts, and spiders—all of which the text instructs to keep their distance—appear in the elaborate border, where color lithography reproduces the brilliant effects of manuscript illumination. Married to an Anglican minister, Abrahall designed this book while moving between postings in Oxfordshire and Wales.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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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.