The Death of General Wolfe at Quebec (September, 1759)

Edward Penny

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Penny painted several versions of the "Death of General Wolfe." The best known was exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1764 and is now at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. A smaller and slightly altered composition, now Petworth House, Sussex, was engraved by Richard Houston and published by R. Sayer in January 1772. The present mezzotint is later, oriented vertically rather than horizontally, and published by Sayer and Bennet, with the engraver not identified.

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