"Why then begin..." illustration to "A Bucolick or Discourse of Neatherds"

Edwin Austin Abbey

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Abbey here represents two cowherds (or neatherds) engaged in a musical competition. One sits on the ground and plays his recorder while the other waits to follow with a song. Lallager, a woman herder ensconced on a rustic stile, acts a judge. In 1878, Harper & Brother sent Abbey to England to research and illustrate verses by the seventeeth-century lyric poet Robert Herrick. Wood engravings based on the artist's drawings began to appear in Harper's "New Monthly Magazine" later that year, and a group were then published in "Selections from the Poetry of Robert Herrick" (New York and London, 1882; MMA 23.78). This design responds to Herrick's "Bucolick, or Discourse of Neatherds," with the related series of illustrations found in the book.

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