Love

Simeon Solomon

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Solomon was eighteen when he made this drawing, preparing to debut at the Royal Academy with "Abraham Sacrificing Isaac." While he used that painting to explore his own Jewish heritage, "Love" demonstrates a parallel fascination with poetic medieval imagery. At right, a young musician leans against a bedpost and gazes at a sleeping girl. A mirror hanging from the bedrail reflects a robed figure with a lamp and a Gothic window in the room behind. The window frames a huge moon whose light spills across the musician's back and a panel of embroidery draped over a wooden rack. The title inscribed in the upper margin ties the composition to a series of monochrome wash drawings of the Passions that Solomon made around this time. Style and imagery both demonstrate the influence of Solomon's mentor Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

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