Love in Death, for "Good Words"

Frederick Walker

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This tragic image of a woman dressed in black, carrying a child through the snow, was created to illustrate "Love and Death," a poem published in the weekly periodical "Good Words for 1862, pp. 184-85 (see 65.629.3(1.13)), introduced by these words, "A woman perished in a snow-storm while passing over the Green Mountains in Vermont; she had an infant with her, who was found alive and well in the morning, carefully wrapped in the mother's clothing."Walker exhibited a related painting, "The Lost Path," at the Royal Academy in 1863 and the the Museum also has a proof of the wood engraving (2014.545.2).

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