Henry William Bunbury Drawing his "Long Minuet"

Thomas Ryder I

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This portrait of Bunbury, a successful gentleman-caricaturist, is based on a pastel that Lawrence showed at the Royal Academy in 1788 (no. 61, "Portrait of a Gentleman", now National Portrait Gallery, London). The younger son of a baronet, Bunbury showed drawings of humorous and poetic subjects at the Royal Academy as an "honorary exhibitor"–an indication that his submissions were not for sale. He etched a few designs himself around 1770, then relied on professionals to transform his designs into published prints.This early working proof has unfinished passages, and lacks engraved text. Bunbury is shown drawing "The Long Minuet at Bath," a humorous image with a novel format that was engraved in stipple by Thomas Ryder, and published by William Dickinson in 1787, on four joined sheets of paper.

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