Mont Blanc Seen from the Massif, Les Aiguilles Rouges

Mont Blanc Seen from the Massif, Les Aiguilles Rouges

Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

One of the nineteenth-century's most influential architects, Viollet-le-Duc, known especially for his restorations of France's greatest churches, was also a prolific author of theoretical writings, as well as a talented draftsman. In this spectacular mountain view he married an architect's understanding of structure and space to an artist's sense of color and line. The drawing dates from the end of Viollet-le-Duc's life, when he was working on a map of the Mont Blanc massif. The map was published in 1876 with a "study of its geodesic and geological construction, of its transformations, and of the old and modern state of its glaciers." Viollet-le-Duc's love for the mountains was born much earlier, however, in 1831, when he took a trip to the Auvergne in central France.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Mont Blanc Seen from the Massif, Les Aiguilles RougesMont Blanc Seen from the Massif, Les Aiguilles RougesMont Blanc Seen from the Massif, Les Aiguilles RougesMont Blanc Seen from the Massif, Les Aiguilles RougesMont Blanc Seen from the Massif, Les Aiguilles Rouges

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.