Admission Ticket for Fonthill Abbey

Thomas Stedman Whitwell

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This print contains a small almond-shaped vignette with a view of the tower of Fonthill Abbey, a Gothic-Revival house built for William Beckford in Wiltshire. The print was made to function as an admission ticket for the abbey for visitors who came to see its contents before it was auctioned off in 1823. Presumably at least several hundred were printed, but very few survive due to their ephemeral nature. A second version of this ticket also exists, suggesting that visitor numbers succeeded expectations.

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