The City Rout

Richard St. George Mansergh St. George

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Two elaborately dressed, coarse looking women face one another at a "rout" or social gathering for City of London tradesmen and their wives. Members of this class had recently grown wealthy through trade and could afford to ape the aristocracy. The image suggests that the adornments chosen by these party-goers are ill-suited to their bulky forms and graceless manners. In addition to richly embellished gowns and elaborate high hair-dos, one woman wears long ostrich feathers – expensive status symbols made au courant by Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Refreshments carried by a short liveried waiter with unkempt hair underscore the mixture of low class and high taste. Elegant jelly glasses perch above a down-to-earth pie and foaming tankard of ale.

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