Sunday Morning

Dox Thrash

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Thrash left his native Griffin, Georgia as a teenager, seeking work and artistic training opportunities in cities across the northern United States. He settled in Philadelphia in his early thirties and often drew on memories of growing up in Georgia for subject matter, as in this work that pictures a woman walking in a rural setting, possibly dressed for church. Thrash is best known for developing carborundum printmaking processes while working at the Fine Print Workshop of Philadelphia, a printmaking workshop established under the Work Projects Administration (WPA), in the late 1930s and early 1940s. But Thrash was skilled in a number of printmaking techniques, and Sunday Morning demonstrates his command of drypoint etching, in which layers of black lines are applied to model volume and form.

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