Tom Jones Assisting Molly Seagrim in the Churchyard

Tom Jones Assisting Molly Seagrim in the Churchyard

Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

After a successful early career in Paris, Loutherbourg relocated to London, where his style evolved to adapt to the new milieu. During this English period he produced more literary-inspired works, including this illustration of a comic and grisly scene from Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749), wherein Tom and the pregnant Molly Seagrim fend off attackers using bones and other objects readily at hand in the Gothic courtyard.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Tom Jones Assisting Molly Seagrim in the ChurchyardTom Jones Assisting Molly Seagrim in the ChurchyardTom Jones Assisting Molly Seagrim in the ChurchyardTom Jones Assisting Molly Seagrim in the ChurchyardTom Jones Assisting Molly Seagrim in the Churchyard

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.