The Beggars

James McNeill Whistler

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Throughout his career, Whistler used vertical compositions to explore dark spaces that recede towards distant lights. In Venice, he found a suitable site at the Sotoportego e Corte de le Carozze, a stone passage with a timbered roof giving access to the Campo Santa Margarita. Whistler took great pains with the succession of figures that establish the receding darkness. At the entrance a gaunt woman with a baby, accompanied by a girl, stands and begs. Within the passage, two female water carriers approach a man wearing a cloak and broad-brimmed hat who walks away, his form silhouetted against the light. By choosing recognizable Venetian types, the artist flirted with the visual vocabulary of genre prints, but avoided any emotional connection with his subjects. This print was included in Venice, a Series of Twelve Etchings (the "First Venice Set"), published by the Fine Art Society in December 1880.

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