Anne Page and Slender (Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 1, Scene 1)

Anne Page and Slender (Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 1, Scene 1)

Samuel William Reynolds, the elder

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This print reproduces a painting that Bonington made around 1825 and shows one of the Merry Wives of Windsor, Anne Page, gesturing towards the foolish Slender who mistakenly believes that the lady welcome his advances. One of the artist's earliest figure subjects in oil, the poses and costumes echo Joseph Strutt's "Complete Book of English Costumes and Vestments" (1797).

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Anne Page and Slender (Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 1, Scene 1)Anne Page and Slender (Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 1, Scene 1)Anne Page and Slender (Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 1, Scene 1)Anne Page and Slender (Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 1, Scene 1)Anne Page and Slender (Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 1, Scene 1)

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.