Adam and Eve (Labour: Whan Adam Delved and Eve Span, Who Was Then the Gentleman?)

Sir Edward Burne-Jones

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Burne-Jones designed this composition to serve as a woodcut frontispiece for A Dream of John Ball (1888)—a socialist novel set during the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, written by his friend William Morris. In that context, the image of earth’s first family appears with a medieval couplet: "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" The image was reconstituted as Labour for the Daily Chronicle in 1895, about the time this untitled photo-relief was created. Without text, the elegiac image sheds any obvious political meaning. Burne-Jones did not share Morris’s socialism, and the difference often tested their friendship.

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