The Tragic Actor: Rouvière in the Role of Hamlet

Edouard Manet

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Manet here presents the celebrated French tragedian Philibert Rouvière as Hamlet, feathered hat in hand and sword at his feet, confronting the viewer against a shadowed background of scribbled lines. His distant, mournful expression, suitable for Shakespeare's tragic hero, may also convey the artist's feelings at the actor's recent death. Manet derived the powerful composition from his related oil painting (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), a work that recalls Velasquez's portrait of the seventeenth-century actor Pablo de Valladolid (Museo del Prado, Madrid).

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