Madame Guillaume Guillon Lethière, née Marie-Joseph-Honorée Vanzenne, and her son Lucien Lethière

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

As a pensioner of the French Academy in Rome, Ingres made portrait drawings of his friends and colleagues, including at least ten portraits of the family of Guillaume Lethière, its director, which date from 1808 to 1818. This double portrait of Lethière's wife and young son is set in the garden of the Villa Medici, the seat of the French Academy (its palace is visible on the left). Drawn in 1808, it is one of the first of Ingres' portrait drawings with a view of Rome as its backdrop.

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