Portrait of Pierre Antoine de Boyer du Suquet

Charles Nicolas Cochin II

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

As the well-educated son of Charles-Nicolas Cochin I, engraver and academician at the Académie Royale, Cochin II enjoyed official favor and advanced quickly. He worked, beginning in 1737, as draftsman for the Menus Plaisirs, recording celebrations and major events of the court in large scale, exquisitely detailed drawings and prints. Inspired, perhaps, by the antique cameos he had seen in Italy, Cochin created several hundred small scale portrait drawings that span his career and constitute a major part of his legacy. Typically profile views drawn in black chalk, these medallion portraits may have grown out of an antiquarian interest, but were nonetheless stylistically avant garde, and would eventually fuel the taste for profile portraits as an aspect of Neoclassical style. Perrin Stein, March 2015

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