Girl Feeding Pigs

Richard Westall

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A productive member of London's Royal Academy, Westall exhibited paintings and watercolors of histories, portraits and rustic scenes. This girl offering water to thirsty pigs demonstrates his mastery of the latter mode, and exemplifies a type of benign rustic imagery popular in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries--leading masters of the mode include Thomas Gainsborough, George Stubbs, and George Morland. By focusing on a sweet girl, whose parents rest by their cottage door in the background in a sunny woodland, the work presents a comforting alternative to the rough realities of rural life. Its success is demonstrated by the fact that two related stipple engravings were published by 1802.

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