Golden head by golden head, for "The Goblin Market"

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In August 1861, Rossetti proposed to the publisher Alexander Macmillan that he create"brotherly designs" to illustrate a volume of his sister Christina's poetry. This drawing is reproduced on the title page of "The Goblin Market and Other Poems." Finished by mid-December, the image was transfered to a wooden block by Rossetti, engraved by William J. Linton and printed and published in April 1862. As if in a fairy tale, we glimpse sisters sleeping in a curtained bed as goblins cavort in the background, the design echoing the related poem which treats temptation and addiction in a symbolic manner and evokes their strength through heightened, sensual verse. At an earlier moment in the story Lizzie manages to resist the goblins's offer of luscious fruit, but Laura succumbs. The young women here sleep peacefully, unaware of the addictive substance that will soon bring Laura close to death and force her sister to undertake an heroic confrontation with the goblins.

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