Beggar Walking on a Crutch

Andries Both

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Tafeletten, small sheets of prepared paper or vellum on which an artist would draw in metalpoint, were often employed in the 17th century in Holland. These sheets would allow the artist to obliterate any unwanted drawings and reuse the surface and by regrounding it. Such drawings do not survive in large numbers today because their surfaces were easily damaged. Scholars speculate that the reason we have no known drawings by artists like Vermeer and Frans Hals is that they drew on tafeletten. This tafelet drawing by Andries Both is part of a group of six similar surviving works by the artist that may have once composed a small, reusable notebook. One of the sheets is dated 1632. Both, one of the group of Dutch artists active in Rome known as the bamboccianti, was known for his coarse and humorous peasant scenes. Based on the dating of one of the other similar sheets, this drawing probably also pre-dates his travel to Italy begun in 1633.

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