Portrait of Cecil Lawson

Portrait of Cecil Lawson

Sir Hubert von Herkomer

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Herkomer based this etching on a watercolor portrait of Cecil Lawson, made in 1877 (National Portrait Gallery, London); a reduced version was made as a frontispiece in "Memoir of Cecil Lawson" by Edmund W. Gosse (1883). Lawson was a painter, watercolorist and member of the Idyllists, whose death at age thirty-two cut short a promising career. He was a close friend of Herkomer's and the two often sketched together in the late 1870s. An impression of the print was exhibited at M. Knoedler & Co., New York in 1882 (no.33) with the following caption by Herkomer: "A dear friend of mine, who died this summer [on June 10, 1882], under painful circumstances. A bright future, full of genius, whose landscapes will be remembered by the frequenters of the Grosvenor Gallery. I etched this for biographical work about to be published. It is pure drypoint."

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.