A Startling Announcement

Currier & Ives

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, lies in a curtained bed after being woken by a young Black boy who announces that Union troops have taken Fort Donelson--in the background Conderates are pursued by Union soldiers. The Battle of Fort Henry, February 6, 1862, was the first significant Union victory of the Civil War. In an effort to gain control of rivers and supply lines west of the Appalachians, General Ulysses S. Grant and Commodore Andrew Foote launched an attack on the lightly defended Fort Henry in Tennessee. After a fierce naval bombardment, Confederate Brigadier General Lloyd Tilghman secretly evacuated the bulk of his troops to nearby Fort Donelson before surrendering to Union forces. The fall of Fort Henry, followed ten days later by the capture of Fort Donelson, opened up both the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers to Union control, cutting off Confederate access to two key waterways for the remainder of the war.

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