The Duenna's Return, from "Illustrated London News"

The Duenna's Return, from "Illustrated London News"

William Luson Thomas

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Within a 17th-century interior, an elderly woman carrying keys enters a room to discover that the young woman under her care has been trysting with an admirer—the latter's is face still visible through an open window in the adjacent room. Horsley became a Royal Academician in 1864, served as the institution's professor of drawing, and also was a proficient etcher and draughtsman on wood. Thomas's wood engraving reproduces a painting that Horsley showed at the Royal Academy in 1864, and the imagery well represents the type of romantic genre subjects for which he became known—Richard Parkes Bonington had pioneered this newly intimate mode of historical painting while working in France during the 1820s.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Duenna's Return, from "Illustrated London News"The Duenna's Return, from "Illustrated London News"The Duenna's Return, from "Illustrated London News"The Duenna's Return, from "Illustrated London News"The Duenna's Return, 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.