French Liberty – British Slavery

James Gillray

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A tattered Frenchman warms his feet at a meager fire while dining on raw scallions and live snails. Deluded and nearing starvation, he declares that Liberté has turned France into a paradise flowing with milk and honey. In an adjacent panel, a portly, well-dressed Briton enjoys beef and ale while complaining about taxes. Gillray here employs the imagery of consumption to contrast the political realities governing France and Britain at the end of 1792. France had recently been declared a Republic and King Louis XVI imprisoned (he would be guillotined on January 21, 1793). Gillray’s Frenchman is a literal sans-culotte ("no-britches"), the nickname applied to the ruling radicals who eschewed aristocratic knee-britches for proletarian trousers. His grotesque figure embodies both the food shortages ravaging Paris and the political mindset that mistook the system established by the Assemblée Nationale for true liberty.

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