The Architect Charles-Victor Famin

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

About a year after he assumed the directorship of the French Academy at the Villa Medici in Rome, Ingres drew this portrait of a newly arrived student of architecture, Charles-Victor Famin (1809-1910). Ingres knew Famin’s father from their student days in the Italian capital and it was likely as a gesture of friendship that he portrayed the young man, who, ultimately, did not distinguish himself professionally. In his reports to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Ingres described him as "definitely an idler ... who failed to fulfill his obligations." Although Famin holds his drafting pencil in hand, the portrait has a casual quality characteristic of Ingres’s more informal approach to portrait drawing during this phase of his career.

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