Graziella, from "Illustrated London News" Christmas Number

Charles Edward Perugini

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This wood engraving after a painting by Perugini shows a beautiful woman in Renaissance dress standing before a column and wall decorated with Cosmatesque mosaics. Born in Naples, Perugini moved to England as a youth, then returned to Rome to train as an artist, moving on to Paris to study with Ary Scheffer. Frederic Leighton recognized his talent and encouraged him to return to London in 1863 where he pursued a successful career painting figures in historical settings, and married Kate, the daughter of Charles Dickens, in 1874. The print was republished in the French weekly newspaper "L'Illustration" on January 1, 1887.

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