Sir Walter Scott

Sir Walter Scott

Auguste Edouart

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Edouart left his native France in 1814 to embark on a career abroad as a silhouette portraitist. In 1829, after touring England, he settled in Edinburgh for three years. During his time there, he produced about five thousand portraits, including this likeness of the famous Scottish author and antiquarian Sir Walter Scott, who penned Ivanhoe (1819), Rob Roy (1817), The Lady of the Lake (1810), and other classics of Western literature. A scholar of Scottish history as well as a collector, Scott is shown at his writing desk, quill pen in hand, occupying an interior in which his collection of weaponry and armor is displayed.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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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.