Public Characters

Thomas Rowlandson

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Rowlandson and Woodward collaborated on this ebullient panel of heads tucked behind ribbons, as though into old-fashioned note boards.The image depicts well-known figures in politics, the theater and society. Four politicians anchor the composition. At center Charles James Fox, dark-haired and unshaven, faces his chief rival, the tall, thin, white-haired William Pitt the Younger. Between them with cropped hair stands George Tierney, a radical Whig whose outrageous remarks led to a duel with Pitt in 1797. Just above Fox is the Whig playwright and politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan, with carbuncled nose and cheeks. Among the three theatricals wearing feathered hats at the upper left are John Kemble, in profile, his sister Sara Siddons, who is being admired by the publisher-critic-caricaturist Edward Topham.

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