A Woman Spinning Flax

A Woman Spinning Flax

François Bonvin

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The motif of a woman sewing, knitting, or, as here, operating a spinning wheel was especially popular in nineteenth-century France, where Realist artists like Bonvin produced images that both exposed and aestheticized the arduous lives of working- and lower middle-class people. Here, Bonvin carefully applied charcoal to model the figure’s face, hands, and costume and to suggest light flooding into the spare interior. Reducing the setting to the bare minimum, he concentrates our attention on the woman and her own absorption in her work.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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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.