L'Escalier (The Curving Stair)

Gabriel de Saint-Aubin

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Admired for his impromptu sketches of daily life in Paris, Saint-Aubin produced one of the liveliest and most insightful records of ancien-régime France. This charming vignette captures an elegant young woman, accompanied by a small boy and a dog, as she lifts the hem of her skirt and prepares to ascend a curving stone stair to a sunlit park.

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