Penton Hook

Penton Hook

Sir Francis Seymour Haden

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Seymour Haden was the unlikely combination of a surgeon and an etcher. Although he pursued a very successful medical career, he is mostly remembered for his etched work as well as for his writings on etching. He was one of a group of artists, including James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) and Alphonse Legros (1837–1911), whose passionate interest in the medium led to the Etching Revival, a movement that lasted well into the twentieth century. The extolling of etching for its inherent spontaneous qualities reached its pinnacle during this time. While the line of the etching needle, Haden wrote, was "free, expressive, full of vivacity," that of the burin was "cold, constrained, uninteresting," and "without identity." In this work, an ancient, hollow tree leans over a river near a fishing boy. In this state, the hollow tree has been scraped away to leave the center blank. Harrington's early catalogue describes this as "Trial proof (c), the tree-trunk...entirely removed." [p. 34] Schneiderman's later catalogue designates it as state three of six, "the tree trunk...completely removed as well as some work on the extreme right side of the plate and most of foul-bite on the left side." [p. 167]

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Penton HookPenton HookPenton HookPenton HookPenton Hook

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.