A Great Picture Sale at Christie's, from "The Graphic"

A Great Picture Sale at Christie's, from "The Graphic"

Sydney Prior Hall

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In 1887 "The Graphic" published a design by Sydney Prior Hall, one of the gifted artists on its staff, showing a London paintings auction in progress conducted by Thomas Woods (1829–1906), one of the partners in the firm Christie, Manson & Woods​. Hall left Oxford to pursue art and made his name sending back images from the front during the Franco-Prussian War. His gift for humor, later demonstrated in illustrations to "Tom Brown's School Days" (1885) is applied here to gently caricature members of the audience.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A Great Picture Sale at Christie's, from "The Graphic"A Great Picture Sale at Christie's, from "The Graphic"A Great Picture Sale at Christie's, from "The Graphic"A Great Picture Sale at Christie's, from "The Graphic"A Great Picture Sale at Christie's, from "The Graphic"

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.