Buy from us with a golden curl, for "The Goblin Market"

Buy from us with a golden curl, 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 a "brotherly design for a frontispiece" to a volume of poems by his sister Christina. The drawing was finished by mid-December but it took until April 1862 Charles Faulkner's related wood engraving to be completed and published. The fairytale-like imagery echoes the related verse, which tells how goblins offer two sisters magic fruit, a food that symbolizes temptation. The artist shows the plainly dressed Lizzie walking uphill at upper right as Laura, in a patterned gown, kneels in the foreground and clips a lock of her luxurious hair to pay the animal-headed goblins crowded at left. The poem dramatically details how Laura's subsequent cravings bring her close to death, and how Lizzie's resistance enables her to confront the goblins and save her sister.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Buy from us with a golden curl, for "The Goblin Market"Buy from us with a golden curl, for "The Goblin Market"Buy from us with a golden curl, for "The Goblin Market"Buy from us with a golden curl, for "The Goblin Market"Buy from us with a golden curl, for "The Goblin Market"

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.