View of the Salon of 1785

Pietro Antonio Martini

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Prioritizing accuracy in this panoramic view, Martini carefully reproduces the paintings at the Salon of 1785, and includes many of the numbers assigned to the works and printed in the Salon's livret (booklet). Jacques-Louis David's The Oath of the Horatii, which was first exhibited in 1785 and is now in the Musée du Louvre, is depicted at the center of the back wall. Along the right-hand wall is Adélaïde Labille-Guiard's Self-Portrait with Two Pupils, which is in the Metropolitan Museum's Department of European Paintings.

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