
Public School
Thomas Rowlandson
An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art
In this third print of a group of eight, teenagers drink punch to excess at a boarding school--one vomits and another has passed out under the table. A schoolmaster does nothing to intervene, and simply holds up an empty carafe in disbelief. The image echoes Hogarth's "A Modern Midnight Conversation" (1733; MMA 91.1.77) where men, supposedly gathered for discourse, drink the night away. The print comes from a set that Rowlandson etched after drawings by Willyams, a university-educated lieutenant-colonel from Cornwall who also supplied supporting satirical text under the pseudonym Joel McCringer. Rowlandson's characteristic elegance does not disguise the dark human impulses being satirized. Modern education, it is suggested, does little to teach self-control, wisdom or empathy.
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.