Our Drawing-room Pets–with 'Kangaroo Jim, the Champion Australian boomerang-thrower', for "Punch"

Our Drawing-room Pets–with 'Kangaroo Jim, the Champion Australian boomerang-thrower', for "Punch"

George Du Maurier

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Du Maurier pokes fun at London society's fascination with the exotic by showing fashionable young women fawning over a burly Australian street performer as their perplexed male companions look on. The celebrity sprawls in a throne-like chair and is fanned by ladies who offer him tea. Text below reveals details of "Kangaroo Jim's" rough early life in Fiji. The image was published in "Punch" on July 2, 1887 and responds to current issues such as Darwinism. The artist had a significant impact on British culture from the 1860s through the 1890s as a talented illustrator, popular cartoonist, and author of the novel "Trilby" (1894).

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Our Drawing-room Pets–with 'Kangaroo Jim, the Champion Australian boomerang-thrower', for "Punch"Our Drawing-room Pets–with 'Kangaroo Jim, the Champion Australian boomerang-thrower', for "Punch"Our Drawing-room Pets–with 'Kangaroo Jim, the Champion Australian boomerang-thrower', for "Punch"Our Drawing-room Pets–with 'Kangaroo Jim, the Champion Australian boomerang-thrower', for "Punch"Our Drawing-room Pets–with 'Kangaroo Jim, the Champion Australian boomerang-thrower', for "Punch"

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.