
Study for "The Bride at Her Toilet on the Day of Her Wedding"
Sir David Wilkie
An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art
This is one of a group of sketches where Wilkie developed compositional ideas for a painting he would show at the Royal Academy, London in 1838 (now National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh). Pen lines suggest movement, and wash is used to indicate shadow as the artist conveys the movements of a young woman dressing for her wedding assisted by a companion and watched by an older woman. The figure's nudity and elevated placement echo classical models, even though the subject was one of Scottish genre, and Wilkie's technique indebted to Dutch seventeenth-century masters such as Rembrandt.
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.