The Shepherd

Welby Sherman

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Sherman belonged to "The Ancients," an artistic brotherhood based at Shoreham, Kent in the late 1820s and early 1830s. His engraving of a youthful shepherd dreaming by the sea is based on a drawing by Samuel Palmer, who wrote in 1828, “If Mr. Sherman have finish’d his print he need not wait ‘til I see it, but may bring it out directly...as the more copies are sold the sooner the plate will be his own.” The work was never published, however, and only five copies are known. The mysterious image conveys Palmer’s admiration for Albrecht Dürer’s "Melancholia", as well as his closeness to George Richmond, a friend and fellow Ancient, whose own "Shepherd" engraving of 1827 describes a figure with a muscular twisted arm gripping a crook.

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