An Angel Bringing Food to a Hermit

Jean Honoré Fragonard

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In this, his first print, Fragonard demonstrates a ready facility with the etching needle, producing a composition based on a chalk drawing by his master, François Boucher. Using a variety of short and staccato lines, Fragonard evokes the rough textures of the desert, where a saint seated on the rocky ground accepts a gift from an angel. The drawing by Boucher that was his model survives today in the National Gallery of Canada (inv.6888).

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