The Infant Hercules

Thomas Rowlandson

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In 1783, at the age of twenty-four, William Pitt became the youngest person ever to head the British government. King George III, who had become fed up with the machinations of a Whig coalition led by Charles James Fox and Frederick Lord North, finally prevailed upon Pitt to accept the premiership. When Rowlandson cast Pitt as the infant Hercules he echoed popular opinion, which saw the youthful minister as a refreshing change from his corrupt, self-serving predecessors. Like the classical hero, Pitt displays amazing strength as he strangles serpents determined to dispatch him. The snakes have the heads of Fox and North, while the shield marked "Chatham" implies that Pitt inherited his zeal from his famously principled father, the Earl of Chatham, just as Hercules’s supernatural strength came from his father, the god Jupiter.

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