The Friend in Need, from "Illustrated London News"

Rebecca Solomon

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This print reproduces a painting by the Victorian artist Rebecca Solomon whose brothers Abraham Solomon and Simeon Solomon were also artists. After studies at the Spitalfields School of Design, Rebecca became a draftsman on wood, illustrator, assistant to her brother Abraham, copyist for John Everett Millais, and exhibited her own oils and watercolors at the Royal Academy and other venues. In this contemporary genre subject, a destitute mother and child seek charity outside a public institution (a poster suggests a missionary society), but are shooed away by a beadle, as a sympathetic woman and girl offer assistance. The wood engraving appeared in the "Illustrated London News," to mark the painting’s exhibition in 1859 at the gallery of Louis Victor Flatou, a London dealer who offered art lovers an alternative to the Royal Academy.

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