Peasants

Georges Seurat

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Beginning in the 1880s, Seurat favored drawing with Conté crayon, a dense, greasy medium consisting of refined graphite and clay. The years 1881 to 1884 are those of Seurat's early artistic maturity and the only period in which he treated the subjects of peasants and agricultural labor with any regularity. This sheet shows Seurat's virtuoso control of his medium, achieving a tonal variation ranging from pure white to pure black. His evocative rendering of the twilight, through both the atmospheric conditions and the figures who are no longer working, is also indicative of his esteem for the painter Jean-François Millet.

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