A Taste for the Fine Arts

Currier & Ives

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In a rural landscape with a river or lake backed by mountains, an artist's easel and painting equipment have been left unattended. The artist has moved away to chat with a woman holding a pail outside a cottage and neither notice the cattle attracted to his belongings. A cow licks the canvas propped on the easel, a calf moves towards the open painting box, and a bull with a bell around its neck looks at the viewer.

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