A Lioness and a Caricature of Ingres

Eugène Delacroix

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This drawing likely dates from a period in which tensions between Delacroix and his rival Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres were particularly high. In the 1840s, critics increasingly cast the two artists as adversaries with opposing styles, and their respective solo exhibitions at the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris amplified the sense of competition. Delacroix also blamed Ingres for blocking his election to the Institut de France, the nation’s premier learned society—a post he eventually achieved in 1857. Here, he inserts at left an acerbic caricature of Ingres in profile, demonstrating the incisiveness he could achieve in pen and ink.

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