Top and Tail

Anonymous, British, 18th century

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

To modern eyes this design looks surreal but it is actually a fashionable, erotic variant of a seventeenth-century print type. Known as Nobody prints, these featured figures composed only of legs and heads, with nothing in between, and the resulting verbal-visual pun was aimed critically at specified target. Here, the elegant female "no-body" is composed of a huge, elaborately dressed, wig sitting atop a bare derriere, with her lower extremities clad in white silk stockings, red garters, and high heeled pumps. Like other fashion satires that mocked the latest trends, this example took aim at the enormous hairdos and wigs that women favored in Britain and France before the French Revolution. The title and partial nudity frankly acknowledges the sexual appeal of the fashion while simultaneously suggesting that those who followed it were literally brainless.

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