Beggars at a Church Door at Rome, from "Illustrated London News"

Beggars at a Church Door at Rome, from "Illustrated London News"

William Luson Thomas

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Elizabeth Murray was a painter and writer, daughter of the artist Thomas Heaphy (1775–1835). She would become a founding member of the Society of Female Artists, London, and a member of the National Watercolour Society, and Institute of Painters in Watercolours. Commissioned by Queen Adelaide (the wife of William IV) to make drawings of Malta, Elizabeth left London at nineteen in 1835, traveled on to Gibraltar and Tangiers. In the latter city married the British Consul, Henry John Murray in 1845. Friendships with Moorish women gave her material for a book, published in 1859 titled Sixteen Years of an Artist's Life in Morocco, Spain and the Canary Islands. In 1860 the Murrays crossed the Atlantic to take up a diplomatic post in Portland, Maine. staying in the United States until 1875. During this period, Elizabeth established artistic contacts along the Eastern seaboard and joined the American Society of Water Color Painters in New York. The present wood engraving reproduces a watercolor she made before her departure for America, one of a several devoted to Roman characters.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Beggars at a Church Door at Rome, from "Illustrated London News"Beggars at a Church Door at Rome, from "Illustrated London News"Beggars at a Church Door at Rome, from "Illustrated London News"Beggars at a Church Door at Rome, from "Illustrated London News"Beggars at a Church Door at Rome, from "Illustrated London News"

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.