
Tired Out, from "The Graphic" Christmas Number
Adrien Emmanuel Marie
An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art
This gently humorous image offers a back-stage glimpse of one of London’s famous Christmas pantomimes, lavish theatrical spectacles that offered audiences fairy tale characters, dancers, child performers, men dressed as women, and sometimes live animals. Here, two dozing children are surrounded by props related to a performance–they may be waiting for a long rehearsal to end. Marie was a French genre painter and illustrator who also worked in London and created this design for the popular weekly periodical "The Graphic." The engraver has not been identified, but the journal, founded in 1869 by William Luson Thomas to rival the "Illustrated London News," attracted readers with beautifully produced color images in Christmas issues, the present example published in 1885.
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.