A Letter to Eugène Maus, Decorated with Two Apples

Edouard Manet

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Manets lodged in Bellevue in a small house at 41 route des Gardes during the summer of 1880. The letters Manet embellished with watercolors of flowers and fruit from his garden at Bellevue and sent to his friends are among the most prized of his works because of their enchanting informality. At least forty letters can be dated with some certainty to his time in Bellevue. This is the first of two addressed to Eugène Maus, a fellow painter, who showed in Paris in the 1880 Salon. He died the following year of a "maladie nerveuse". Manet shares with Maus his concern about his own submission to the 1880 Salon in Ghent: "Chez le Père Lathuile" 1879 (Musée des Beaux-Arts de Tournai).

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