Portrait of Gerard Edema

Mary Beale

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Edema was a Dutch painter who traveled to Newfoundland, New York and Surinam, then settled in Britain and became known as the "Salvator Rosa of the North." Here, he wears a short wig and plain jacket as he gazes fixedly at the viewer. The drawing is executed in ink wash, with touches of white, and includes an indistinct passage below that suggests a longer torso was once contemplated. A seventeeth-century inscription on the mount attributes the work to Mary Beale, a connection which cannot be confirmed because no other portrait drawings firmly attributed to her are known. In 1762, the image was incorporated into a triple portrait of Gerard Soest, Jan Griffier, and Edema (all born in the Netherlands), engraved as an illustration in Matthew Pilkington's "Dictionary of Painters."

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