The Letter E, from The Alphabet

Master ES

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Among Master ES’s most remarkable engravings is a delightful series of letters consisting of twenty-three rare individual prints that once formed an alphabet (alphabets of this period normally lack the letters j, v, and w). The artist composed each lower case letter by cleverly interweaving both real and mythical people and animals. Here two dogs fight with a cat and a bird over the head of a man. The cat’s gently curving tail defines the upper portion of the letter. Little is known about the master whose name derives from the initals that appear on later works. Evidence points to Master ES having been trained as a goldsmith, most notably the fact that he used goldsmith punches, tools that are hammered into the metal printing plate, to create patterns such as the small flowers and circles on the figure’s tunic.

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