Gaetano Rossi Napoletano

Jean-Baptiste Joseph Wicar

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Wicar entered the Paris studio of Jacques Louis David in 1781 and accompanied his master to Rome in 1784. He remained in Italy for most of his life, achieving success as a painter of portraits and history subjects in the manner of David and assembling three successive collections of significant Italian drawings. This sheet featuring a Neapolitan sitter comes from a sketchbook of informal portraits. Appointed by Joseph Bonaparte as director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples in 1806, Wicar spent three or four years in the southern Italian city. The spare style of the drawing recalls the directness of the portraits David made while imprisoned after the fall of Robespierre, the radical Jacobin leader of the Revolution.

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