Youth Sleeping in a Chair

François André Vincent

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Vincent was trained in the atelier of Joseph Marie Vien and traveled to Rome in 1771 to study at the Académie de France. While a gifted draftsman, he had a mutable style, close in his early years to that of Jean Honoré Fragonard, then shifting more toward Neoclassicism in the 1780s, though he always maintained a natural vigor in his handling of ink and chalk. This study of a young man asleep in a chair dates to his early years at the French Academy in Rome (1771-75), where, as part of the formal curriculum, the students learned techniques for depicting drapery by making studies after posed models. Vincent here used black and white chalks to convincingly render the fall of light on the heavy drapery of the dozing figure.

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