Drawing Room at Hatton, Warwickshire

Drawing Room at Hatton, Warwickshire

Granddaughters of Dr. Samuel Parr

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This amateur watercolor records an interior in Dr. Samuel Parr's substantial parsonage at Hatton, where he lived for three decades and ran a small private school for boys. We are shown three women whose dress suggests a date in the 1820s. An inscription once attached to the frame notes that the carved chair behind the table "had been for many years used in the House of Commons," was moved during alterations, passed through several owners, then presented to Dr. Parr. The text also identifies sitters in the portrait prints on the walls as Dr. Parr, Princess Charlotte, Sir Samuel Romilly, Mr. Horner-Johnson, [William?] Paley, Thomas Warton, Joseph Warton, Gilbert Wakefield, Oliver Goldsmith, Loweth and [Thomas?] Twining.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Drawing Room at Hatton, WarwickshireDrawing Room at Hatton, WarwickshireDrawing Room at Hatton, WarwickshireDrawing Room at Hatton, WarwickshireDrawing Room at Hatton, Warwickshire

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.