Pierrot

James McNeill Whistler

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In an old district of Amsterdam, Whistler represents two figures emerging from a shadowed workshop at the edge of a canal. Leaning against a slender post, a young man clad in an apron looks across the water as his female companion dips a cloth into it. The still, dark, reflective surface fills the foreground and doubles the forms, and the title, Pierrot, evokes a tragicomic commedia dell’arte character suggested by the pallor of the man’s face. The print belongs to a set the artist made in Amsterdam during a two-month stay in early fall 1889, following his summer marriage to Beatrice Philip, the widow of architect Edward William Godwin.

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