Coming from St. Ives Market

Robert Walker Macbeth

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Working men and women, accompanied by sheep, move along a country road. A setting sun back-lights dust raised by their feet to surround the forms with halo-like clouds. Macbeth based the etching on a painting he had shown at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1878, exhibiting an impression of the print at the Royal Academy in 1879 (no. 1257). The artist had moved to London from Edinburgh in 1870, then designed wood engravings for "The Graphic." Studies at the Royal Academy encouraged ambitious oils that treated themes of rural labor. Associated with the Idyllists, Macbeth was a close friend of Frederick Walker—both men were also were skilled watercolorists and members of the Royal Watercolour Society.

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