Doctors' Commons

Thomas Rowlandson

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Rowlandson and Pugin here describe the hall of a self-governing, teaching body known as the College of Civilians (or Society of Doctors' Commons) on Paternoster Row. Its members specialized in ecclesiastical and civil law (as opposed to English common law), earned doctorates at Oxford or Cambridge, then were admitted as advocates by the Dean of Arches who served the archbishop of Canterbury. The fellows worked with proctors whose duties paralleled those of solicitors and, in court, concerned themselves with cases of Church and Admiralty law. On an everyday level, they verified and stored documents such as wills and marriage and divorce certificates. By the mid-nineteenth century, as England moved towards establishing a centralized supreme court in charge of both civil and common law, the Doctor's Commons became obsolete and would be dissolved.

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