The Dame's Absence, from "Illustrated London News"

The Dame's Absence, from "Illustrated London News"

Harvey Orrin Smith

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In their teacher's absence, a group of children attending a country dame school grow restless and seem ready to get into mischief. One takes off her smock, another eats an apple, others look at a jug and mug at right. Rankley had trained at the schools of the Royal Academy and sent literary, poetic and dramatic subjects there for exhibition from 1841. By the 1850s he was moving towards genre and contemporary narrative with titles such as "The Sunday School" (1850), "The Village School" (1856). The present image belongs to the latter group, and the related painting was shown at the Royal Academy in 1857, then engraved by Harvey Orrin Smith for the "Illustrated London News." Founded in 1842 as the world’s first weekly news magazine, this periodical regularly published examples of contemporary art and exhibition reviews.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Dame's Absence, from "Illustrated London News"The Dame's Absence, from "Illustrated London News"The Dame's Absence, from "Illustrated London News"The Dame's Absence, from "Illustrated London News"The Dame's Absence, 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.