San Francisco

Charles Meryon

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Meryon traveled widely during his early career in the French navy, though he never visited San Francisco, the subject of this panoramic view. He received the commission for this unusually large plate from two real estate speculators, whose profiles appear above the inscription, and who seem to have intended to use the print to sell shares in a fraudulent Franco-Californian company. The artist based the image on five daguerreotypes (now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago) and complained about the difficulty of synthesizing the photographs, which had been taken from different positions and under varying lighting conditions.

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