Whiskers

Dox Thrash

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The glow that emanates from Whiskers, a portrait of an unidentified man, is characteristic of Thrash’s work in carborundum mezzotint, a technique he developed while working at the Philadelphia-based printshop of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project. The project was established by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal government to provide funding to unemployed artists during the Great Depression. Thrash adapted the mezzotint process, invented in the seventeenth century, by employing the industrial material of carborundum to abrade the metal plate. Working from dark to light, he burnished, or smoothed, the rough surface to form his composition, achieving an impressive tonal range of rich blacks.

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