Mrs. Abington as Thalia

Francesco Bartolozzi

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Beauty and talent propelled Fanny Barton (later Mrs. Abington) to fame, from humble beginnings as a flower girl and milliner's assistant. Associated with the Drury Lane Theatre, she excelled in contemporary comic roles by Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Colley Cibber and, in Shakespeare's plays, performed Ophelia, Desdemona, Beatrice and Portia. Horace Walpole compared her favorably to Garrick, and the artist James Northcote noted that, "in her acting she has all the simplicity of nature and not the least tincture of the theatrical." In this image she embodies Thalia, the muse of music, dance, comedy and idyllic poetry, to crown Shakespeare with laurels.

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