Two Costume Designs or Portrait Types

Two Costume Designs or Portrait Types

Anonymous, French, 18th century

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Page with two round portraits or costume designs. The left portrait is of a full-length woman seated on a bench facing right. She is wearing a white corseted dress with a fichu tucked into the bodice and a blue ribbon around her waist. She has a straw hat with blue feathers and a veil. The portrait on the right shows of a woman from the waist up, in a frontal position, but gazing towards the left. She is wearing a purple and yellow dress with a fichu tucked into her bodice. She has a straw hat with a purple ribbon and white feathers.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Two Costume Designs or Portrait TypesTwo Costume Designs or Portrait TypesTwo Costume Designs or Portrait TypesTwo Costume Designs or Portrait TypesTwo Costume Designs or Portrait Types

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.