Winged Putti with Flowers

François Boucher

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This sheet is one of several studies related to Apollo Revealing His Divinity to Issé (1750; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Tours), a large mythological painting in which swirls of frolicking putti encircle the main figural group. Many such drawings, and quite possibly the present sheet, would have been made not as preliminary studies, but after the painting was completed, to satisy the market demand for drawings by Boucher's hand. Here, he uses black chalk, stumped in places to create a soft gray, and white chalk highlights to deftly model the dimpled flesh of the cupids and their baskets of flowers.

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