Two Hares

William Bell Scott

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

These whimsical hares, facing one another heraldic style, once decorated Penkill Castle, Ayrshire, Scotland. In 1860, Scott had fallen in love with Alice Boyd, a student at the Government School of Design in Newcastle-on-Tyne where he was master. They formed a bond that lasted until the artist's death, even as he remained married, spending summers at Penkill. After Alice inherited the castle in 1865 from her brother, they welcomed Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Arthur Hughes, and Lawrence Alma-Tadema as guests. The present work comes from a series of twenty-seven works on paper centered on animals, birds, reptiles and insects. When the castle changed hands in 1992, its contents were dispersed.

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