The Notre-Dame Pump (small plate)

Charles Meryon

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Meryon occasionally composed verse to accompany his prints. In this case, he designed a separate plate for his poem about the Notre-Dame water pump. In translation, the tongue-in-cheek text reads: It is done, O perfidy! Poor pump, Without pomp, you must die! But to diminish This iniquitous sentence, Why not, as a touch of Bacchic mischief, Begin to pump, Impromptu, Fine wine, Instead of pure water, Which nobody really savors? Meryon playfully suggests a miracle that might save the pump from demolition even as the tangled, leaking pipes that form the poem’s decorative border evoke the inefficiency of this seventeenth-century structure.

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