Cupid, in the Character of a Link Boy

John Dean

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Dean's print reproduces a painting by Reynolds devoted to a familiar London sight—linkboys who were paid to light pedestrians through dark streets before public lighting became commonplace. One of Reynolds's most loyal patrons, John Frederick Sackville, 3rd Duke of Dorset (1745–1799), bought the painting from the artist in 1774, it then remained in the family through the late nineteenth century and is now in the Albright–Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. This impression once belonged to to the British painter Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830) as part of a large collection of mezzotints after Reynolds.

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