Grandfather's Portrait, from "Illustrated London News"

Grandfather's Portrait, from "Illustrated London News"

William Luson Thomas

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In a rustic kitchen a farmer examines a portrait that his young son has drawn on a slate as the rest of the family look on admiringly. Knight's paintings of rural families and boys at play relied upon genre types developed a few decades before by David Wilkie and William Mulready. Knight here echoes a theme found in the biographies of famous artists—Vasari, for example, recorded how Giotto, when a shepherd boy, drew pictures of his flock on rocks that attracted the attention of the Florentine painter Cimabue, who then took the youth on as an apprentice. This print, executed by the leading engraver Thomas, was published one year before Knight’s early death at the age of forty, and the related oil painting is at the Tunbridge Wells Museum and Gallery.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Grandfather's Portrait, from "Illustrated London News"Grandfather's Portrait, from "Illustrated London News"Grandfather's Portrait, from "Illustrated London News"Grandfather's Portrait, from "Illustrated London News"Grandfather's Portrait, 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.