The Great Fight

William Chester Walker

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This column, decorated with a small woodcut, appeared in Pierce Egan's newspaper "Life in London. The text describes a boxing match between Tom Brown and Tom Shelton, in 1824 at Plumb Park, near Stoney Stratford, sixty miles from London. The image shows two pugilists stripped to the waist, accompanied by their seconds, with a bottleman and referee. The text notes that distance from London, and competing interest in another match, limited London spectators to about 50.

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