The Notre-Dame Pump, Paris

Charles Meryon

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The demolition of the water pump on the Notre-Dame bridge, ordered by the Paris municipal government in 1851, encouraged Meryon to select the old structure as a subject for his etching the following year. As part of the plan instituted by Emperor Napoleon III to improve city infrastructure, the water supply system was overhauled, rendering this seventeenth-century pump defunct. Meryon wrote in 1853 of his regret for its destruction, because the pump had been an "unusual and curious thing" in a city that was becoming "more and more regular."

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