Madame Alexandre Lethière, née Rosa Meli, and Her Daughter, Letizia

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This drawing is closely related to the Museum’s Madame Alexandre Lethière and Her Daughter Letizia by Ingres and is in fact a nearly identical tracing that the artist excised and pasted onto a new sheet of heavy white paper. A member of the Lethière family, who wanted a copy, may have requested the traced version. Rosa Meli, an Italian apothecary’s daughter, was the second wife of Alexandre Lethière, whose father, Guillaume, was director of the French Academy in Rome and a close friend of Ingres’s.

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