A Sick Call, from "Illustrated London News"

Horace Harral

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A priest is rowed in a boat, accompanied by altar boys as a woman weeps next to the oarsman. The architecture indicates a setting in Belgium or northern Germany. Lawless was born in Dublin to a prosperous Roman Catholic family, traveled in France and the Low Countries, and was pursuing a promising London career when his life was cut short by tuberculosis in 1864. That makes the present subject a poignant one, since the prognosis does not seem hopeful for the patient to whose bed the religious figures are travelling–an unhappy outcome indicated by a dimly lit lamp, broken reed in the foreground, and sickle that rest on the stern. The full title of Lawless's related painting of 1863, now National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, is, "The Sick Call: "Is any man sick among you? Let him bring in the priest of the Church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the Name of the Lord."

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.

Metropolitan Museum of Art