The Golden Age

Valentine Green

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

West’s "The Golden Age" imagines an ideal time when humans lived in peace and prosperity. Within a rural interior suggestive of the classical past, a mother sews and watches over her sleeping child, as its grandparents enjoy the sun and feed poultry by an open doorway. Outside, nature’s fertility is affirmed by a ploughman who guides oxen and symbolizes the pastoral ideal associated with the Golden Age, an ideal period described by ancient authors such as Hesiod and Ovid. Ironically, when this print appeared, Britain and America had just entered the Revolutionary War, a conflict that shattered societal serenity on both sides of the Atlantic.

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