Animal Kingdom: Natural History Cabinet (Règne animal: Cabinet d'histoire naturelle), from La Caricature, plates 265 and 266

J. J. Grandville

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Lithograph satirizing King Louis-Philippe and his political collaborators by protraying them as animal specimens on display in a natural history museum.

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