The Sultan

Jean Honoré Fragonard

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Despite its traditional title, this sheet represents not a sultan but a model dressed in Turkish attire. Posing and drawing figures in exotic costume was a long-standing tradition at the Académie de France in Rome where Fragonard had studied—a practice connected both to masquerades and to the training of young history painters. However, this sheet dates to 1774, when Fragonard visited Rome a second time, this time in the company of his patron, Pierre Jacques Onésyme Bergeret de Grancourt. As with many of his brown wash drawings of the 1770s, the wash here is intentionally diluted, its transparency leaving visible the freely executed black chalk underdrawing. A modern copy of this drawing, once considered to be the original, is also in the museum's collection (1972.118.213).

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