Genoveva

Adrian Ludwig Richter

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Richter's life-long interest in medieval legend is evident in this delicately detailed watercolor that depicts Genoveva of Brabant, wife of the 13th century count palatine, Siegfried of Treves (now Trier in the German Rhineland). While her husband was away at war, she was falsely accused of adultery and condemned to death. Spared by the executioner, she fled to the forest of Ardennes in France, and lived with her son in a cave for six years, fed by a female deer. Based on a large etching Richter made some thirty years earlier, in 1848, this image uses delicately controlled color to suggest a forest idyll in which animals nurture and protect two wronged innocents.

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