Jean-Pierre de Bougainville

Louis de Carmontelle

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Born Louis Carrogis, the son of a cobbler, Carmontelle used his wit and talent to elevate his social position, eventually becoming employed in the d’Orléans court, where his duties included tutoring the duke’s son, designing gardens, and staging plays. As a draftsman, he left a legacy of 750 watercolor portraits, representing a broad swath of enlightenment society. The sitter, the scholar Jean-Pierre de Bougainville, was named to the Académie des Inscriptions and then, with the backing of Madame de Pompadour, elected to the Académie Française in 1754. De Bougainville would die at age forty, "a real loss for the world of letters," according to a manuscript penned near the end of Carmontelle’s life by his friend Richard de Lédans. Perrin Stein, March 2015

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