The Last Drop

Thomas Rowlandson

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Standing on tiptoe, a short, heavy-bellied "cit," or City of London tradesman, struggles to drain a large punch bowl. In his haste, the tippler has abandoned ladle and glass and fails to notice the menacing skeleton, a literal representation of his fast approaching demise. Empty wine bottles on the floor signal hours of past indulgence, while the port and ale on the table indicate his intended future imbibing. The bottle marked Usquebaugh, a Gaelic word from which "whiskey" derives, contains a liquor used to make punch. Rowlandson’s humorous take on humanity’s capacity for self-destruction relies on a late medieval moralizing conceit, The Dance of Death, famously embodied by Hans Holbein the Younger in a woodcut series of 1538.

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