Four Scenes: How to Ride Genteel & Agreeable Down Hill; How to be Run Away With; The Mistaken Notion; How to Loose Your Way

Henry William Bunbury

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Four small scenes make gentle fun of various aspects of riding. In "How to Ride Genteel & Agreeable Down Hill,: a man rides slowly. In "How to Run Away With," a rider tilts back in an effort to control his mount and topples a woman with a wheelbarrow. In "The Mistaken Notion," a young man rides to the left, and in "How to Loose Your Way," a rider whose hat has blown down over his eyes in a squall does not see signposts that point to London and Oxford.

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