A Riding School with a Visiting Family

Dirk Langendijk

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A riding instructor stands next to a hitching post, at center, and watches his students practice. At right a wealthy family pays a visit to the school. An overt contrast is drawn between this group and the mother with young children and dog left of center in the immediate foreground. Watching over the scene is a version of the Medici Venus. The peaceful scene recalls works by the seventeenth-century artist Philips Wouwermans, which Langendijk and his patrons would have known and admired.

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