Portrait of a gentleman

John Scarlett Davis

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Davis drew this portrait while touring Yorkshire between 1825 and 1828. Sir Thomas Lawrence introduced him to potential clients and the artist advertised his abilities in exhibitions held by the Northern Society, Leeds. A child prodigy, Davis won a medal at the age of eleven from the Society of Arts in London, and was commissioned to portray local dignitaries at Leominster while there at school. After further studies at the Royal Academy Schools, Davis worked as a portraitist, landscape painter, and watercolorist influenced by Richard Parkes Bonington. In the eighteen thirties and forties he painted a well-regarded series of interior views of art galleries, palaces and churches.

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