Fairlop Fair, Essex

Thomas Rowlandson

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Rowlandson here depicts a country road packed with wagons and pedestrians, the scene observed by cottagers at left. Three versions of the composition are known, one with a sign over the cottage door inscribed "Fairlop Fair, Essex." This annual event originated as a meal hosted each July by a London engineer, Daniel Day (1683–1767). The latter centered on a huge five hundred year old tree, the Fairlop oak, in Hainault Forest. Traders with stalls came to serve the crowd and, by the middle of the eighteenth century, the "fair" drew close to a hundred thousand. In June 1805, the oak caught fire and by 1820 it had blown down. In this drawing, Rowlandson represents the tree as a leafless silhouette standing at the center of a distant field.

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