Puss in Boots, an entertaining School-Piece: by Young Slyboots [School piece or Penmanship sheet]

Laurie & Whittle

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This print is decorated at the top and sides with images from "Puss in Boots," a fairytale that originated in Italy with the best known version published in France by Charles Perrault (1628–1703). A cartouche at the bottom simulates a draped sheet held up by clusters of feathers that was intended to contain the name of a student scribe. The work comes from a genre known as writing sheets, writing blanks, penmanship exercises, letter sheets or school pieces, published in Britain ca. 1660 to 1860 and used by students to demonstrate their handwriting abilities, with this example unusued. The publisher dated the print 1802, but the paper has an 1815 watermark, demonstrating that the related printing plate was used over a long period.

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.