Lovers embracing (recto). A suppliant figure (verso)

James Jefferys

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Drawings by Jefferys were long attributed to contemporaries such as James Barry or John Hamilton Mortimer. Following the discovery of a signed work by Jefferys in an English library in the 1970s, which provided a clear example of the artist’s style, he is now recognized as the chief contributor to the "Master of the Giants Album," a dispersed group to which this sheet belongs. Jefferys’s controlled, expressive style demonstrates admiration for Italian mannerists such as Baccio Bandinelli, whom he studied in Rome during the 1770s as part of a circle centered on Henry Fuseli. The figures express intense emotions, captured in the artist’s dynamic pen work, but the context that inspired their interactions remains mysterious.

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