"The Entertaining History of Little Jack" [School piece or Penmanship sheet]

John Bewick

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This printed sheet is decorated at the top and sides with images that illustrate Thomas Day's "The Entertaining History of Little Jack." A vignette along the bottom shows a boy running in a landscape towards a goat. "The Story of Little Jack" was first published in 1788 with illustrations by Bewick and belongs to a genre that focused on stories centered on orphans or foundlings. The work comes from a genre known as writing sheets, writing blanks, penmanship exercises, letter sheets or school pieces, published in Britain from the 1660s to 1860s and used by students to demonstrate their handwriting abilities. This example never used. While the publisher dated this print 1806, the paper is watermarked 1815, demonstrating that the 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.