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The satirical scenes of the celebrated English artist William Hogarth (1697–1764) are iconic representations of eighteenth-century urban life at a time of great socio-economic disparity.

A museum and independent research library, the Morgan Library & Museum began as the personal library of financier, collector, and cultural benefactor John Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913). As early as 1890, Morgan had begun to assemble a collection of illuminated, literary, and historical manuscripts, early printed books, and old master drawings and prints.

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscape artists often sketched outdoors in oil paint on paper to capture nature from direct observation. Yet as natural as these scenes look, the vantages were chosen or augmented to draw the viewer into the composition.

The Morgan celebrates the recently-completed Saint John's Bible, created using traditional illumination techniques.

This exhibition will include more than ninety drawings created between 1900 and 2013 by artists from Matisse, Mondrian, and Schiele to Pollock, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Twombly, and—more recently—Kippenberger and Dumas.

Delirium: The Art of the Symbolist Book explores creative encounters between Symbolist authors and the artists in their circles.

In 2009 when the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon unveiled a previously unknown portrait painting with strong claims to be the only surviving life-time portrait of William Shakespeare, it created an international sensation.

Objects on view in J. Pierpont Morgan’s library reflect the past, present, and future of the collections in four curatorial departments, comprising illuminated manuscripts from the medieval and Renaissance eras, five hundred years of printed books, literary manuscripts and correspondence, as well as printed music and autograph manuscripts by composers.

A Collective Invention: Photographs at Play signals the debut of photography as a curatorial focus at the Morgan.

While J. Pierpont Morgan’s private collection of illuminated manuscripts focused on Christian Europe, he also purchased non-Western items