Rural Sports, A Milling Match

Thomas Rowlandson

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A boxing match takes place here on a 25 foot stage, before a crowd estimated at 15,000. The English champion Thomas Cribb, with cuts on the face, strikes Tom Molineux who falls backwards. This second contest between the fighters took place at Thisselton Gap, Rutland on September 28, 1811. Molineaux was an African-American, said to have been enslaved in Virginia. He had crossed the Atlantic in 1809 and had fought Cribb previously at Sheninghton Hollow, Oxfordshire on December 3, 1810, going down to defeat in 35 rounds in a disputed decision. At this rematch, Cribb's second was John Gully and his bottle-holder Joe Ward while Molineaux's second was Bill Richmond (also American-American by birth and once enslaved), and his bottleman Bill Gibbons. In a match that lasted 19 minutes, Cribb broke his opponent's jaw in the 9th round, and knocked him out in the 11th. Milling was a common slang term at this period for bare-knuckle boxing (see 59.533.1446 and 69.635.2 for other prints of the subject).

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