Study for “Madame Théodore Gobillard” (Yves Morisot)

Study for “Madame Théodore Gobillard” (Yves Morisot)

Edgar Degas

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Degas made this portrait sketch of the older sister of fellow painter Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) in the living room of the family home in Paris. Letters between the Morisot sisters and their mother recount its creation. Madame Morisot wrote to her third daughter Edma: "Do you know that Monsieur Degas is mad about Yves’s face, and that he is doing a sketch of her? . . . He is going to transfer onto the canvas what he did here in an album." The sitter, apparently pleased with Degas’s efforts, wrote: "The drawing that M. Degas made of me in the last two days is really very pretty, both true to life and delicate. . . . I doubt that he can transfer it onto the canvas without ruining it." The resulting unfinished painting (29.100.45) enlarges the composition by about fifty percent.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Study for “Madame Théodore Gobillard” (Yves Morisot)Study for “Madame Théodore Gobillard” (Yves Morisot)Study for “Madame Théodore Gobillard” (Yves Morisot)Study for “Madame Théodore Gobillard” (Yves Morisot)Study for “Madame Théodore Gobillard” (Yves Morisot)

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.