Studies of Arab Heads and Figures

Eugène Delacroix

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

By the time Delacroix returned from North Africa, he had amassed an abundance of reference material, thanks to his prolific sketching. He admitted that it took him years to digest the copious drawings and notations he made during the voyage and to distill them into a significant picture. Accumulative sheets such as this one, which served as collections of subjects initially sketched elsewhere, may have played a role in his extended process of sorting, selecting, and condensing his own drawings.

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