The Skylark

Samuel Palmer

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Samuel Palmer, one of the greatest British etchers, engaged throughout his career with the poetry of John Milton. This pastoral idyll - in which a man accompanied by a dog, pauses at a gate to watch a bird soar into the early-morning sky - relates to a passage in Milton's L'Allegro of 1645 (lines 40-44): "To hear the lark begin his flight/ And singing startle the dull night,/ From his watch-towre in the skies/ Till the dappled dawn doth rise."

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