Die Frau mit dem Spinnennnetz zwischen kahlen Baumen (Seated Woman with a Spider's Web)

Christian Friedrich

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This image was designed by the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich and cut into a wood block by his brother, Christian, a furniture-maker by trade. Like many of the painter’s landscapes, this small scene of a woman seated at the base of a dead tree is emotionally resonant. Her face is hidden as she gazes into the distance, and the only movement is the activity of the spider that weaves a web above her head. Indeed, the print is sometimes referred to with the title "Melancholy," a nod to Friedrich’s debt to Albrecht Dürer’s sixteenth-century print of the same subject.

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