At Dinner

At Dinner

Thomas Rowlandson

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A man wearing a white wig, a jacket and ruffled cuffs bends over a table to eat with a knife and fork. At right is a roast chicken on a platter, with two other dishes to either side. A standing servant pours a glass of wine from a carafe, and a dog sits on its hind legs to smell the food at lower right. One of a series that Rowlandson made around the same time, titled: "Waiting for Dinner," "At Dinner," "After Dinner," and "Preparing for Supper."


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.