L'Écolier, from "L'Univers Illustré"

L'Écolier, from "L'Univers Illustré"

Henry Linton

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Linton's wood engraving reproduces Reynolds's charming 1779 conception of a schoolboy, a painting owned by the Earls of Warwick, and included in seven nineteenth century exhibitions. Its appearance at Manchester in 1857 was noted in the "Illustrated London News" (October 1857), and the present image subsequently reissued in "L’Univers Illustré" in 1861. The conception echoes Rembrandt, as well as more recent images by Philippe Mercier and Jean Baptiste Greuze, and the accompanying text in the French periodical mused: "Who among us has not pondered our youth in melancholy moments. Our anxiety is assuaged when we laugh at things we once perceived to be unjust tribulations!...The famous English painter Reynolds must have painted his delightful study of the schoolboy...in response to such thoughts, and we do not think anything more natural or expressive than this urchin's head is possible."

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

L'Écolier, from "L'Univers Illustré"L'Écolier, from "L'Univers Illustré"L'Écolier, from "L'Univers Illustré"L'Écolier, from "L'Univers Illustré"L'Écolier, from "L'Univers Illustré"

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.