Self Portrait as a Young Man

Baron Dominique Vivant Denon

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In a career spanning a tumultuous period of French history, Vivant Denon held an impressive variety of posts, including diplomat and museum director. His graphic skills would serve many purposes throughout his career, from recording condemned aristocrats on the way to the guillotine to documenting Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign of 1798. Here, many years before the French Revolution, he portrayed himself in a softly lit interior as a young artist working on a drawing. As Marie-Anne Dupuy-Vachey pointed out in 2015 (see references), this drawings seems to have been the model for an etching by Denon, where the head alone appears in reverse direction (see 22.69.21).

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