Poet (from "Twelve Characters from Shakespeare")

Poet (from "Twelve Characters from Shakespeare")

John Hamilton Mortimer

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Mortimer admired Salvator Rosa, absorbed aspects of his dramatic style, and sought British equivalents for his subjects. This etching comes from a series that Mortimer devoted to leading Shakespearean characters, based on drawings exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1775. Merging the seventeenth-century genres of the character head and tête d'expression (expressive head), Mortimer's designs also incorporate elements of history painting to convey the Bard's inventive range. Here he represents a poet described by Duke Theseus in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," using the image to suggest that artistic creativity bridges nature and the divine: "The Poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rowling, Doth glance from heav'n to earth, from earth to heav'n, And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the Poet's pen Turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name." (A Midsummer Night's Dream, act 5, scene 1)

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Poet (from "Twelve Characters from Shakespeare")Poet (from "Twelve Characters from Shakespeare")Poet (from "Twelve Characters from Shakespeare")Poet (from "Twelve Characters from Shakespeare")Poet (from "Twelve Characters from Shakespeare")

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.