Pont-au-change, Paris

Charles Meryon

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This etching is among the most expansive views of Meryon’s Paris prints and contains more narrative detail than the majority of the works in the series. A drowning man in the foreground reaches out toward a boat whose occupants, distracted, gesture toward a balloon inscribed "Esperanza" (Hope, in Spanish) that hovers in the sky above. Pedestrians on the bridge also wave at the balloon as a funeral cortege passes by. Meryon composed a separate plate of verse to accompany this etching. It begins, "O divine hope! light balloon!" but concludes pessimistically, describing hope as a "false mirage."

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