The Captive, from "Illustrated London News"

The Captive, from "Illustrated London News"

H. Harrison

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Harrison's wood engraving reproduces a work that the Irish painter Fisher exhibited at the British Institution, London in 1848 (no.312) and shows a young white woman in harem dress seated despondently on a divan in a Turkish interior. A dark skinned female, nude to the waist, kneels and offers her refreshment. Unlike exoticized renderings of harems by artists such as Ingres, this image suggests the sad reality experienced by young women captured by the Turks and forced into sexual slavery.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Captive, from "Illustrated London News"The Captive, from "Illustrated London News"The Captive, from "Illustrated London News"The Captive, from "Illustrated London News"The Captive, from "Illustrated London News"

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.