The Muse Erato Writing Verses Inspired by Love
Charles Meynier
An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art
In 1797 François-Bernard Boyer-Fonfrède, an industrial textile manufacturer, commissioned Meynier to paint nine canvases featuring Apollo and the Muses for a large room in his home in Toulouse. Meynier exhibited the painting based on this drawing at the Salon of 1800 but ultimately only completed five canvases, as his patron ran out of money. The paintings were installed in the hall of Wallenried Castle, Switzerland by General Castella de Berlens around 1824, where they remained until 1983. The group was acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2003. In this study, Erato, the muse of lyrical poetry, writes verses using Love's arrow as he whispers in her ear. Typical of his style as a draftsman, Meynier sketched in his classicizing figures in a confident manner, using a muscular ink outline over a black chalk underdrawing. A liberal use of white gouache lends the scene a painterly and sunlit quality. The drawing is squared in black chalk to facilitate the transfer of the design, but, nonetheless, the artist made several adjustments to the final composition. In the painting, Meynier significantly increases the amount of foliage, creating a feathery green frame around the figures. Reflections were also added to the pool along the lower margin and the toppled basket of flowers was righted and placed on the left side, by the lyre.
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.