Night and Her Children Aither and Hemera (Hesiod, Theogony)

Henry Fuseli

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

For this etching, Fuseli turned to a passage from Hesiod’s Theogony, a poem written in about 700 b.c. on the origins of the cosmos and the genealogies of the gods. Here, Night bears two children, Aither (Brightness or Sky) and Hemera (Day), by her brother Erebus (Darkness). The nebulous character of the unfinished figures adds to the mystery of the origin story itself. It is not clear why the artist never completed the print, and this may be the only impression.

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