A Stag Beetle

Pierre Joseph Redouté

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Redouté’s stag beetle looks like it has just crawled onto this drawing’s animal-skin support, thanks to the artist’s subtle use of shadow and his attentiveness to minute anatomical details. The borders that frame this insect, as well as its placement at the center of the composition, however, suggest its status as a specimen. Best known for his depictions of flowers, Redouté worked for noteworthy figures like France’s Queen Marie Antoinette and, later, Empress Joséphine Bonaparte. His works bear witness to an increasing interest in empiricist knowledge of the natural world that was ushered in during the Enlightenment period, when documentation and categorization of natural-history specimens reached a pinnacle. This drawing is one among more than six thousand watercolors that Redouté created over the course of his career.

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