Quentin Durward and the disguised Louis XI (recto). Study of male figure (verso)

Richard Parkes Bonington

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Working in Paris, Bonington established new standards for watercolor, and here uses the medium to describe an episode near the start of Sir Walter Scott's "Quentin Durward" (1823). That novel dramatizes a fifteenth-century power struggle between Louis XI and Charles, Duke of Burgundy, and proved more popular in France than Britain when first published. The title character, standing here at right, is a young man of good family who travels to Plessisles-Tours in France to seek employment in the king's band of Scottish archers. After nearly drowning while fording a flooded river, Durward upbraids two onlookers who failed to warn him of the danger. Dressed as merchants, they are in fact Louis XI and Tristan l'Hermite, Marshall of France. The king–calling himself Maître Pierre and sporting red hose–admires the young man's spirit, conveyed in the drawing through his assertive stance. For many years this work was known only through an engraving by Edward Goodall used as a frontispiece in the 1831 set of Waverly Novels published by Robert Cadell.

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