In the Zoological Garden

Félix Bracquemond

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

As the first ambitious attempt in the nineteenth century to create a multicolor print through combining several plates (in this case four), Bracquemond’s In the Zoological Garden is a pioneering work in the history of French printmaking. These two impressions, both of the same final state, indicate the variations that could be achieved through the inking process. The artist exhibited the print at the Fourth Impressionist Exhibition in 1879, where his subject of fashionably dressed women enjoying the new bourgeois pleasure grounds of Paris would have resonated with the works of his fellow exhibitors.

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