How to Pluck a Goose

Thomas Rowlandson

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A young officer playing the card game Cassino with three elderly expert females is the "goose" being plucked in this print. The women wear fashionable high-waisted dresses and feathered turbans, and the partners, at left and right, make genteel exclamations over the officer’s bad luck. Having already collected "a bumper," or unopposed string of eight tricks, they are about to conclude the game as the woman in spectacles displays a "great casino" (the ten of diamonds) and achieves the winning count of eleven. In Britain, decorum prevented women from visiting public gaming establishments, but allowed them to play for money in private. While the elderly players in Rowlandson’s print mask their skill with a veneer of gentility, the work reflects the widespread approbation aimed at women who enriched themselves by acting like male sharpers.

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