A Midsummer Night's Dream (Shakespeare, Act 4, Scene 1)

Sir Edwin Henry Landseer

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The fairy queen Titania here leans adoringly against Bottom, a weaver who has magically been given the head of an ass (in Shakespeare’s act 4, scene 1). Fairies and enchanted animals attend the pair within a woodland bower, as the queen’s gauzy attire and her paramour’s Turkish slippers suggest a harem scene. Watching gleefully from behind is Puck, the sprite who engineered the bizarre coupling at the behest of the queen’s angry husband, Oberon. Cousins skillfully manipulated the soft tonal technique of mezzotint and mixed it with other intaglio methods to reproduce a painting by the celebrated animal painter Landseer. When that work (made for the English engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel) was exhibited in 1851, Queen Victoria praised it as "a gem, beautiful, fairy-like and graceful."

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