A Compendious Treatise on Modern Education

A Compendious Treatise on Modern Education

Thomas Rowlandson

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This title page introduces a set of prints that Rowlandson etched after drawings by Willyams, a Cornish, university-educated lieutenant-colonel who supplied supporting text using the pseudonym Joel McCringer. Rowlandson's characteristic elegance does not disguise the dark human impulses being satirized. Modern education, it is suggested, does little to teach self-control, wisdom or empathy. Scenes show boys hurting chicks and insects, youths drinking, and young men carousing and gambling. Many of the images respond to themes that Hogarth addressed in his print series "Stages of Cruelty" and "A Modern Midnight Conversation" (1751 and 1733, MMA 32.35(118) and 19.1.77).

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A Compendious Treatise on Modern EducationA Compendious Treatise on Modern EducationA Compendious Treatise on Modern EducationA Compendious Treatise on Modern EducationA Compendious Treatise on Modern Education

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.