Trafalgar Tavern, Greenwich

James Tissot

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Tissot's depiction focuses on the view from a dining table out through a window of a riverside London tavern. Here, from one of the jutting bays, other patrons can be seen in an adjacent balcony and below children play on the foreshore of the River Thames. He first exhibited the etching simultaneously in 1879 at two London venues, the Dudley Gallery and the Grosvenor Gallery. The former was his preferred venue for exhibiting his prints from 1876 onwards. The etching was singled out by a critic from the weekly newspaper "Athenaeum" who described it as a "remarkable piece of draughtsmanship, the foreshortening of the old balcony being excellent."

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