The Proscribed Royalist

William Henry Simmons

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A young Puritan woman looks anxiously over her shoulder as she hands food to a Royalist soldier hiding in a hollow oak. He is on the run after the 1651 defeat of Charles II’s troops at Worcester, the last major battle of the English Civil War. The suggestion that the two are star-crossed lovers echoes Bellini’s I Puritani—an opera that Millais likely saw at Covent Garden before completing The Proscribed Royalist (1853; The Andrew Lloyd Weber Collection). The publication of this reproductive print in 1858 testifies to the success of his conception. Simmons skillfully mixed etching, mezzotint, and stipple to contrast the textures of smooth skin and fabric, rough bark and dappled foliage. As a former member of the recently disbanded Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Millais continued to make nature studies to underpin the physical and emotional immediacy of his subjects.

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