Fishing Luggers (Chasse-marée) Making Sail, Off Calais

Louis François Thomas Francia

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A native of Calais, Francia is remembered for his links to British watercolor painting. After studying in his home town at the Académie de Dessin, the artist moved to England in 1790 to teach, exhibited at the Royal Academy and attended Dr. Thomas Monro's "academy" of evening drawing sessions from 1795. He there met Thomas Girtin and became, with the latter, a founding member of the sketching society known as The Brothers. In 1808 Francia joined the Associated Artists in Watercolors and would exhibit over one hundred drawings there. After returning to Calais in 1817, Francia continued to teach and exhibit, introducing French artists to the latest English watercolor techniques. He briefly taught the young Richard Parkes Bonington when the latter's family arrived in Calais from Nottingham in 1817 to manufacture lace, and the two artists remained fast friends after the Boningtons moved on to Paris. Indeed, the coastal watercolor subjects that the two artists produced around this time can be hard to tell apart.

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