Mademoiselle Bécat at the Café des Ambassadeurs, Paris

Mademoiselle Bécat at the Café des Ambassadeurs, Paris

Edgar Degas

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Although cafés had flourished in Paris throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, they became the rage in literature and art after 1875, when the society of the Third Republic increasingly sought an animated public life outside the home and traditional milieus. Degas was one of the first in the circle of French Impressionists to portray the café-concert, a subject previously confined to popular prints and illustrated weeklies.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Mademoiselle Bécat at the Café des Ambassadeurs, ParisMademoiselle Bécat at the Café des Ambassadeurs, ParisMademoiselle Bécat at the Café des Ambassadeurs, ParisMademoiselle Bécat at the Café des Ambassadeurs, ParisMademoiselle Bécat at the Café des Ambassadeurs, Paris

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.