Revolutionary Calendar

Louis Philibert Debucourt

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Following the French Revolution, a Republican calendar was adopted and in use from 1793 to 1805. The religious and royalist references of the Gregorian calendar were purged and replaced with names drawn from nature. With a structure based on the decimal system, the new calendar began each year in the autumn. Debucourt presents the calendar with the months and days of Year II (1793–94) inscribed in a box. The allegorical figure of Philosophy sits atop a stone outcropping amid various symbols of learning and the newly founded French Republic. Based on his own design, it is a tour de force of the aquatint technique, employing a full range of painterly tones, from white and pale grays through the inkiest blacks.

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