Jardin Public, Champs Elysées

Gabriel Thouin

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Gabriel Thouin was the son of Jean-André Thouin, who had been a gardener in the service of the king of France. Following in his father’s footsteps, Gabriel became a gardener as well. Throughout his career, he documented the most famous private and public gardens in France, which he eventually published in the two-volume study Plans raisonnés de toutes les espèces de jardins. Although his preparatory drawings are beautifully colored, he opted for simple black-and-white illustrations to keep the book’s production cost low, thus making it available to a wider audience. In a later edition, Thouin’s striking palette was introduced through the new medium of color lithography.

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