Mlle. Etienne-Joconde-Cunégonde-Bécassin de Constitutionnel...

Honoré Daumier

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In this lithograph published in "La Caricature," Daumier lampoons the bourgeois journal "Le Constitutionnel," shown in the guise of a corpulent woman with the head of the editor Charles Guillaume Etienne. A medallion of King Louis-Philippe displayed prominently between her breasts attests to the paper’s loyalty to the monarch. Etienne reacts with disdain to a performance of "Anthony," a play by Alexandre Dumas, père, which achieved great popular success, but was censored due to its critical view of marriage and casual portrayal of adultery.

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