Oedipus at Colonus, Cursing his Son Polynices

Henry Fuseli

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Working as a draftsman in Rome during the 1770s, Fuseli developed a distinctive, Romantic style and became the leader of a forward-looking circle of British and Scandinavian artists and sculptors. Near the end of an eight-year stay, he imagined this archetypal father-son confrontation, taking his subject from Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus–a play that he likely read in the original Greek. The artist presents the blind, dying king, guided by his daughters into the sacred grove of the Temple of Poseidon, near Athens. Meeting Polynices, a son who had earlier exiled his father from Thebes, Oedipus curses him. The frieze-like arrangement demonstrates Fuseli’s study of classical marbles while the dynamic poses figures betray his admiration for Michelangelo and the Italian Mannerists. The artist returned to this subject three times as a draftsman, and once as a painter, but this recently discovered work appears to be his earliest conception.

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