South Sea Islanders

Auguste Edouart

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This unusual picture shows the complex compositions that Edouart’s silhouette cutting could achieve. The work features various natives, wearing animal skins and headdresses and holding arrows, spears, and flutes, as well as a mother and child, in a vast, tropical landscape replete with huts in the background. The central violent scene shows two men engaged in a brutal battle with weapons. While it is unknown whether Edouart ever visited such an island, records verify that much of his life was spent traveling the Anglo-European world.

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