A Labour of Love, from "Illustrated News of the World"

A Labour of Love, from "Illustrated News of the World"

Thomas Francis Dicksee

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A student of Henry Perronet Briggs, Dicksee came from a family of artists and exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1841 through 1895. He specialized in historical and genre subjects and often portrayed actors in roles. Between 1873 and 1895 the artist produced a series of evocative full-length depictions of leading female characters from Shakespeare, shown within landscapes, including "Ophelia" (1875), "Juliet" (1875), "Cleopatra" (1876), and "Miranda" (1895). The present representation of a young woman who joyfully carries a young boy through a rocky Welsh landscape anticipates those dramatic works, and was shown by Dicksee at the British Institution in 1860, then engraved for the "Illustrated News of the World."

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A Labour of Love, from "Illustrated News of the World"A Labour of Love, from "Illustrated News of the World"A Labour of Love, from "Illustrated News of the World"A Labour of Love, from "Illustrated News of the World"A Labour of Love, from "Illustrated News of the World"

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.