Noah

Sir Edward Burne-Jones

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

As Morris & Company’s primary stained-glass designer, Burne-Jones drew this striking figure for a four-light window at Jesus College Chapel, Cambridge, installed between 1874 and 1877, where Noah appears with three other patriarchs—Adam, Enoch, and Abraham. Confident strokes of charcoal demonstrate the artist’s awareness that his design would be broken down into panels for the glass painters then rejoined using lead strips. Noah’s angular posture and broadly treated drapery recall the forms of twelfth-century English prototypes and were intended to sympathize with the chapel’s Norman architecture, then being restored.

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