Frances Wright of Nashoba

Charles Joseph Hullmandel

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In 1826, Frances "Fanny" Wright founded the Nashoba Commune in Tennessee to test her theory of emancipation. Although she aspired to found an interracial, egalitarian utopia, it was a fundamentally flawed scheme that required enslaved people to work to buy their freedom. When, ultimately, the community could not sustain itself, she took the remaining residents to the newly independent nation of Haiti in 1830, where President Jean-Pierre Boyer welcomed them as free citizens and gave them land. The artist of this portrait, Auguste Hervieu, accompanied the author Frances Trollope to America in 1827 as a tutor to her children. He later served as illustrator for her book "Domestic Manners of the Americans" (1832), which briefly describes their stay at Nashoba.

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