Sir Launcelot and Elouise the Fair, for "The Story of the Champions of the Round Table"

Sir Launcelot and Elouise the Fair, for "The Story of the Champions of the Round Table"

Howard Pyle

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Elouise the Fair greets Sir Launcelot in an abbey courtyard in Pyle's image, drawn to illustrate "The Story of the Champions of the Round Table" (1905). The artist also wrote the related text which tells how Elouise, seated in an apartment overlooking a courtyard, heard "a sudden sound of a great horse coming on the stone pavement of the court below...arose hastily...saw how he was that came...and ran down to the court...several of her maidens with her." Pyle was aware of the work of European contemporaries and skillfully adapted his style to suit particular subjects. A great lover of the middle ages, he here echoes Edward Burne-Jones's designs for William Morris's Kelmscott Press and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's seminal images for Moxon's 1857 edition of Tennyson.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Sir Launcelot and Elouise the Fair, for "The Story of the Champions of the Round Table"Sir Launcelot and Elouise the Fair, for "The Story of the Champions of the Round Table"Sir Launcelot and Elouise the Fair, for "The Story of the Champions of the Round Table"Sir Launcelot and Elouise the Fair, for "The Story of the Champions of the Round Table"Sir Launcelot and Elouise the Fair, for "The Story of the Champions of the Round Table"

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.