Pyrrhus in the House of Glaucias

Augustin Pajou

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This drawing illustrates a scene from Plutarch’s Lives: the infant king Pyrrhus, after he is banished from his native Epirus, is presented to the Illyrian king Glaucias and his wife to request asylum. This large and fluidly worked sheet was included among the drawings Pajou exhibited in the Salon of 1759 and was part of the collection of his former teacher, the sculptor Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne the Younger (French, 1704–1778). The precisely delineated shadows evoke the shallow space of a relief sculpture, and in fact, this composition would go on to be realized in three dimensions, twice in plaster and once in leather.

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