Christian Inspiration

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Combining watercolor and pastel, this work lays out the composition for one of three major murals Puvis designed for the staircase of the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Lyon. To treat the subject of Christianity as a source of inspiration for making art, Puvis shows a "Fra Angelico-type" working to complete a mural while younger artists look on. He dedicated the sheet to one of his own students, Paul Baudoüin, who became a leading practitioner of fresco in late nineteenth-century France.

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