All Fours

Thomas Rowlandson

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Within an oval, two men play "All Fours" an English card game similar to Whist. They sit on ladder-backed chairs at a small round topped tripod table. The older man, at right, pulls an ace of spades from his hand and displays it as the winning card. He is dressed plainly and wears a bob wig. The younger man, thin and fashionably dressed, with a pigtail queue, reacts in consternation. He has played a king or queen of spades, which is outranked by the ace. Cards from a previous round lie on the table.

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