The Vampire

Charles Meryon

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Meryon was plagued by mental illness and spent the last years of his brief life in an asylum. The dark, gothic tenor that characterizes many of his prints has been interpreted as symptomatic of his tumultuous life. This print, taken from his album Eaux-fortes sur Paris, shows a grotesque gargoyle from Notre-Dame Cathedral against an aerial view of the expanding French capital. Surrounded by a flock of darkly colored birds, the sculpture takes on a menacing, monstrous appearance, especially as it dominates the right half of the composition. Meryon added a verse of his own creation to this later state of the print, describing the figure as an "insatiable vampire, eternal lust" who "covets its food in the great city." The artist continued to revise the plate over the course of a decade, producing a total of ten states of the etching before his untimely death in 1868.

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