The Life Class of the Vienna Academy

Johann Jacobe

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Members of the Vienna Academy are represented sketching, painting, and sculpting from a live model. Quadal, who specialized in portraits and animal subjects, sits sketching in the right foreground. Jacobé taught mezzotint—an intaglio technique in which subtle gradations of light and shade form the image—at the Vienna Academy. Thanks to his professorship, Vienna produced the only significant school of mezzotint artists in the late eighteenth century outside of London. This impression is a proof, a step in the working process, and the names of the artists had yet to be engraved on the plate. They were added by hand in brown ink in the bottom margin.

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