The Virgin Placing St. Teresa of Avila Under the Protection of St. Joseph

The Virgin Placing St. Teresa of Avila Under the Protection of St. Joseph

François Guillaume Ménageot

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This oil sketch is a study for a painting commissioned in 1784 for the chapel of the Carmelites at Saint-Denis by Madame Louise de France, daughter of King Louis XV, now in the Hôtel-Dieu, Québec.Ménageot created this oil sketch of Saint Teresa of Avila, a well-known reformer and Carmelite nun, in preparation for the larger painting. Ménageot's quick brushwork creates an atmospheric, gray space, and the dark clouds in which the Virgin and Joseph sit loosely convey a sense of bulk and mass, whereas the table and foreground elements are more dryly executed. Infrared photography shows stiff outlines in the underdrawing, suggesting that Ménageot employed a transfer process to lay down the design, yet did not follow them exactly with the oil paint. Ménageot, who studied with both Jean Baptiste Henri Deshays and François Boucher, won the prestigious Prix-de-Rome in 1766 and became the director of the Académie de France in Rome in 1787. He resigned only five years later amid the upheavals of the French Revolution and moved to the Italian town of Vincenza.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Virgin Placing St. Teresa of Avila Under the Protection of St. JosephThe Virgin Placing St. Teresa of Avila Under the Protection of St. JosephThe Virgin Placing St. Teresa of Avila Under the Protection of St. JosephThe Virgin Placing St. Teresa of Avila Under the Protection of St. JosephThe Virgin Placing St. Teresa of Avila Under the Protection of St. Joseph

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.