Self-Portrait

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Carpeaux was one of the rare sculptors who also excelled as a painter and draftsman, comfortably using a broad range of media to pursue his artistic vision. Here, he uses red, brown, and white chalks to produce a moody and masterfully modelled self-portrait. Carpeaux, like Courbet, was fascinated with his own image, creating at least 14 painted self-portraits and six on paper. This one is among his most haunting. Lit from above, with the artist’s features cast in shadow, it evokes Carpeaux’s psychological complexity, as both a genius and as an individual suffering from various maladies.

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