A Knight of the Order of the Garter

Sir Peter Lely (Pieter van der Faes)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This drawing by Lely, a painter trained in Holland who became a naturalized Englishman, represents a young knight pausing to bow during the great annual ceremonial procession that celebrates the Order of the Garter at Windsor. The work comes from a group considered among the most important Baroque drawings produced in England. Conveying the glamor of Charles II’s restoration court, the image survives as a haunting record of an ambitious, but unrealized, decorative scheme, most likely for a set of tapestries. Delicately applied chalks and pastel blend Lely’s native Dutch naturalism with the elegantly expressive line he admired in Sir Antony Van Dyck, to produce a style that established figure drawing in Britain.

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