Study of Two Women

Etienne Jeaurat

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Jeaurat belonged to a literary society interested in social life outside aristocratic circles (the Société du Bout du Banc) and painted unidealized genre scenes of the working classes. This drawing is a study for his painting The Painter’s Move (Le déménagement du peintre, ca. 1755), which shows a wooden cart moving the artist’s family and possessions through the streets of Paris. In the finished work, the two women—one holding a large loaf of bread and the other seated, holding a small container—occupy opposite ends of the composition. On this sheet, however, they share the same attentive atmosphere. Probably sketching from life, Jeaurat used parallel hatching and white highlights to delicately suggest volume and lighting contrasts.

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