Rinaldo in the Enchanted Forest

Jean Honoré Fragonard

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This boldly handled and beautifully preserved drawing by Fragonard illustrates a scene from canto 18 of Torquato Tasso's epic poem Jerusalem Delivered, published in 1581. The poem was a highly fictionalized and fantastic account of the First Crusade in 1099. In this scene, Rinaldo, a Christian knight on his way to the Holy Land, is detained by the pagan enchantress Armida until two of his fellow knights break the spell. Fragonard's drawing imagines the decisive moment of Rinaldo's victory, as he brandishes his sword overhead in the act of chopping down Armida's massive myrtle tree, thereby dispelling its enchantments. This sheet was made soon after Fragonard returned to Paris after having spent five years in Rome, from 1756 to 1761. Exposure to the masters of the Italian Baroque led him to move beyond his early style, which had been indebted to the sweet Rococo manner of his teacher François Boucher, and to endow his figures and compositions with a new energy and dynamism. Along with this stylistic shift emerged a marked predilection for sketchlike canvases and large, painterly drawings.

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