All Essays
Drawings and Prints
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
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 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
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
By the mid-nineteenth century, art devoted to Shakespeare was an international phenomenon.
Constance C. McPhee
November 1, 2016
Prints documented the plight of the oppressed and commemorated the struggles and achievements of social reform.
Mark McDonald
September 1, 2016
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
Like the avant-garde artists who preceded them, these contemporary artists show how wordplay can be used as a means to address larger artistic, social, and political concerns.
Jennifer Farrell
August 1, 2016
Antonio Canova is considered the greatest Neoclassical sculptor of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Christina Ferando
July 1, 2016
… some twentieth-century artists engaged letterforms and language in the graphic arts in ways that challenged dominant linguistic codes, as well as cultural, social, and political structures.
Jennifer Farrell
July 1, 2016