The Hand of Poussin, after Ingres

Georges Seurat

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The young Seurat made more drawings after Ingres than any other artistic source. Here, he studied the detail of Poussin’s hand in Ingres’s "Apotheosis of Homer" at the Louvre. Ingres had looked to Poussin’s self-portrait, also in the Louvre, for his representation of the painter placed in the lower left of his canvas. Focusing on the hand of the seventeenth-century founder of the French classical tradition, Seurat’s inscription on the drawing notes, "voila le génie" (there is the genius).

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