The Beggars (Eulenspiegel)

Lucas van Leyden

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This image of a traveling family, their baskets loaded with small children, is based on a popular satirical book entitled Ship of Fools, by Sebastian Brandt (1494). The couple are beggars who pretend to be pilgrims and borrow children to look more needy. The father wears the signs of a pilgrim, a pilgrim’s hat sporting with a cockle shell and an awl. The owl on the shoulder of the small boy symbolizes sin and idleness, while the bagpipes signals folly. Here, Lucas etched the entrireentire image and thenbefore went retracing theover the figural group with engraving with large amounts of engraving. The engraved lines bind and set the group apart from the background, adding further dimension.

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