Private School

Thomas Rowlandson

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In this second print of a group of eight, young boys surround a bird's nest and two prepare to throw stones at a fallen chick. They are ignored by a distant schoolmaster, and only one boy appears horrified by the cruelty that a companion shows to a butterfly. Related text by Willyams, who also designed the image, suggests satirically that cruel children will grow up to be sucessful adults and that the main purpose of grammar school is to rid them of soft-heartedness. The author-designer was a university-educated lieutenant-colonel from Cornwall who also supplied supporting satirical text under the pseudonym Joel McCringer. Rowlandson, who etched the print, imbues the figures with his own characteristic elegance which does not disguise the dark human impulses being satirized. Like Hogarth's "First Stage of Cruelty," the image implies that boys allowed to mistreat small creatures will grow up to do far worse.

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