Caricature of a windblown woman on the beach at Rottingdean, Sussex

Caricature of a windblown woman on the beach at Rottingdean, Sussex

Sir Edward Burne-Jones

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Burne-Jones produced caricatures throughout his career to entertain friends and family. These also offered an emotional release as visual opposites to the ideal forms that filled the artist's paintings. In the 1860s, when Burne-Jones and William Morris shared rooms at Red Lion Square, the artist often contrasted his own thinness to his friend's rotund figure. The present image is one of many focused on large women and reflects Burne-Jones's concurrent fascination with, and horror at, obesity. He created this drawing to entertain Bertram Brooke, the future Tuan Muda of Sarawak, while the latter was a teenager recooperating from serious illness. The recipient treasured the drawing and later gave it to his wife Gladys. In a memoir of 1929, she identifies the subject as a woman honeymooning at Rottingdean, Sussex (a suberb of Brighton where Burne-Jones had a country house), but specifies it must be "a widow remarried, as there is no indication of virginal contours."

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Caricature of a windblown woman on the beach at Rottingdean, SussexCaricature of a windblown woman on the beach at Rottingdean, SussexCaricature of a windblown woman on the beach at Rottingdean, SussexCaricature of a windblown woman on the beach at Rottingdean, SussexCaricature of a windblown woman on the beach at Rottingdean, Sussex

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.