Combe Bottom
Sir Francis Seymour Haden
An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art
Seymour Haden was the unlikely combination of a surgeon and an etcher. Although he pursued a very successful medical career, he is mostly remembered for his etched work as well as for his writings on etching. He was one of a group of artists, including James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) and Alphonse Legros (1837–1911), whose passionate interest in the medium led to the so-called etching revival, a period that lasted well into the twentieth century. The extolling of etching for its inherent spontaneous qualities reached its pinnacle during this time. While the line of the etching needle, Haden wrote, was "free, expressive, full of vivacity," that of the burin was "cold, constrained, uninteresting," and "without identity." Landscape with two rabits at lower right. "Published States: First.-The shadows of the rabbits are etched in. Inserted in the earlier numbers of Études à l'eau-forte to block out a portion of the letterpress." [Source: Harrington, p. 16] "State X (D1, H1). Published in Études à l'eau-forte (text). The lower left to the middle right of the plate burnished out. The rabbits and their shadows and the lines of the middle distance re-etched, and parallel oblique lines added to the lower right corner; there is additional foul-biting in the lower right corner. Diagonal parallel lines added to sky at upper left. Witht he new annotation S. Haden Shere (E, l.r., 'S. Haden' à double trait)." [Source:Schneiderman, p. 105]
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.