Abram Incab Messir

Sir David Wilkie

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Wilkie reenergized British genre painting before travelling to Turkey and the Holy Land in 1840 to seek new subjects. His death on shipboard on the return journey was a blow to artist contemporaries. This vivid portrait of a Turkish official belongs to a series of Middle Eastern subjects that are considered Wilkie’s culminating achievement as a draftsman. To convey the sitter’s authority, the artist adopted a low viewpoint, and combined chalks and watercolors to create a glowing effect. A journal entry made in Smyrna (modern Izmir, Turkey) indicates that the artist began the commission on January 27, 1841, while an inscription on this sheet confirms completion two days later. The artist typically made such portraits in pairs—letting the patron choose one and retaining the other (the version that belonged to Wilkie is now at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford).

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