The Rehearsal or the Baron and the Elephant

George Cruikshank

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Cruikshank was nineteen when he etched this pseudo-oriental procession parodying recent spectacles on the London stage. A month before, Covent Garden’s annual Christmas pantomime had featured a live elephant and the artist holds actor-manager John Kemble responsible for sacrificing traditional drama to profit. Perched on the offending pachyderm, Kemble catches coins while discarding a cloak that symbolizes his reputation as a tragic actor. The elephant advertises The Murder of Shakespeare and shakes a figure symbolizing old-fashioned Comedy with his trunk. The action played out before the elephant parodies an amateur performance by Robert Coates at the Haymarket. Coates used the occasion to insult prominent audience member, the Baron de Geramb who is shown perched on the elephant’s trunk, while Coates rides a golden cockerel.

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