"A man of strife in wrathful mood, he neared the nurse's door." Study for "Strife and Peace"

George John Pinwell

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Pinwell belonged to the Idyllists, a group of young British artists active from the mid 1860s into the 1870s (others in the group were Frederick Walker and Arthur Boyd Houghton). This meditative image responds to a poem by Jean Ingelow and was engraved by the Dalziel Brothers, then published in Ingelow's "Poems" (1867, p. 266; see 65.629.11 and 20.72 for copies of the volume in the Met's collection). Related lines of verse read: "Trouble and no release; / But the babe whose life awoke the strife / Hath entered into peace," the implication being that the baby held by the seated woman in the background of the drawing beyond a closing door, has just died. Pinwell responds in a typically meditative way to this sad subject. White bodycolor addtions and areas of reworking demonstrate how he developed the image which is close in size to the related wood engraving.

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