An Alleyway between Houses

Théodore Rousseau

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This work is highly unusual in the landscape painter’s graphic oeuvre; there is only one other known drawing by the artist squared for transfer. Rousseau made drawings to record the topography of sites he visited, but they rarely correspond directly with finished paintings. The inscription "Bourron" likely refers to Bourron-Marlotte, a village south of the Fontainebleau forest, a site popular with other early Barbizon painters including Camille Corot (1796–1875) and Caruelle d’Aligny (1798–1871). The sparse linearity with which Rousseau describes the stone surfaces of this cobbled alleyway represents a graphic approach favored by the artist in the later decades of his career.

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