All Essays

Drawings and Prints
Series
Detail of hand colored pen and ink rebus letter consisting of horizontal lines of images and letters.
Explore European rebuses in The Met collection with Nancy Rosin, a volunteer cataloguer in Drawings and Prints.
Nancy Rosin
February 14
Microscope on a small work of art on paper
In 2022, The Met offered for the first time a fellowship designed to bridge the worlds of curatorial practice, and the scientific study of art.
Olivia Dill
May 31, 2023
Lithograph and watercolor valentine of a couple and an altar of love.
Explore the life and work of Jonathan King, one of the nineteenth century’s most important producers of valentines.
Nancy Rosin
February 14, 2023
Black and white print of the Allegory of Africa with a woman representing Africa riding an alligator surrounded by other wild animals.
European artists from the Renaissance onward have visualized the known world through allegorical figures derived from ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman personifications.
Freyda Spira
March 1, 2021
The Met Fifth facade
Though Jefferson R. Burdick allegedly never attended a baseball game, a major part of his vast gift to The Met is one of the largest collections of baseball cards now held by any public institution.
Allison Rudnick
November 1, 2018
The Met Fifth facade
The elaborate folio-sized publication was the first anthology-type book dedicated to British furniture design, and could grace the shelves of the gentleman’s library alongside publications from the Continent.
Femke Speelberg
May 1, 2018
The Met Fifth facade
Early portraits of Shakespeare preserve his appearance for posterity, while copies and variations indicate how perceptions of the poet-playwright shifted across later generations.
Constance C. McPhee
May 1, 2017
The Met Fifth facade
By the mid-nineteenth century, art devoted to Shakespeare was an international phenomenon.
Constance C. McPhee
November 1, 2016
The Met Fifth facade
Prints documented the plight of the oppressed and commemorated the struggles and achievements of social reform.
Mark McDonald
September 1, 2016
The Met Fifth facade
As early as the first century A.D., the Roman author Pliny the Elder acknowledged the appeal of unfinished works of art, stating that they are often more admired than those that are finished, because in them the artists’ actual thoughts are left visible.
Eva Reifert
August 1, 2016