Admiral Sir Fleetwood Broughton Reynolds Pellew

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The son of a distinguished officer in the British Royal Navy, Fleetwood Pellew (1789–1861) also made his career at sea from the tender age of nine. Ingres drew this portrait of Fleetwood as well as one of his wife Harriet (Private Collection) while the two were likely on honeymoon in Rome. They were among the droves of British tourists who returned to Italy following Napoleon’s defeat, more than twenty of whom sat for Ingres, who made his living on such commissions. The young naval officer appears somewhat arrogant in Ingres’s characterization, a trait that may have been his downfall, as the crews of his ships twice mutinied, which, astonishingly, did not seem to hamper his eventual ascension to the rank of admiral.

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