Emancipation of the Negroes – The Past and the Future (from "Harper's Weekly")

Thomas Nast

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

On January 1, 1863 Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order based on his constitutional authority as commander in chief. All enslaved persons in Confederate territory were declared to be forever free. Nast held strong liberal views and his family had emigrated from Germany to New York in 1848 to escape persecution. Here he created a striking, complex image for Harper’s Weekly that celebrates the promise inherent in the proclamation. In a large central vignette an African American family enjoy domestic tranquility around a "Union" stove while, immediately below, a baby symbolizing the New Year breaks the shackles of a kneeling slave. Scenes at left detail horrors associated with slavery–whipping, branding and the separation of families. At right, these are contrasted with future blessings–payment for work, public education, and enjoying one’s own home, goals that could only be realized if the Union won the war.

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