The Duel Interrupted

Herbert Bourne

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Bourne’s engraving after a painting by Stone shows two men with swords facing one another outside a half-timbered building. They are prevented from dueling by a young woman in white who restrains the younger combatant. Stone’s related painting was shown at the Royal Academy in 1868 (639), and Bourne exhibited an impression of the engraving in 1870 (873). The print was published in The Art Journal, London, in January 1871 and this New York reissue likely appeared soon after. Marcus Stone had received early instruction from artist-father Frank Stone, then drew illustrationfor periodicals and books, including Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend in 1861 and 1863. He achieved his greatest success with romantic and historical genre paintings, and was elected a Royal Academician in 1886. No specific literary source has been connected to this image, but primed by historical novels and plays, viewers would have imagined a likely context.

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