Section of a "Galerie dans le palais d'un souverain"

Charles Pierre Joseph Normand

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Among the architectural drawings donated by Charles and Jayne Wrightsman are many so-called projets. They represent highly finished ideas for monumental buildings, conceived either in an academic environment or for a specific architectural competition, such as the Grand Prix de Rome. Although most of these projets were never realized, they were of great importance for the training and careers of architects in late eighteenth-century France, allowing them to demonstrate their skills in draftsmanship and design and to exhibit their ideas. Like Normand’s Gallery in a Sovereign’s Palace, these drawings often portray particularly grand buildings. As such, these projets can be understood to represent the avant-garde of architectural design.

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