Bronze Garden Vase with Two Dragons from the Gardens of Versailles

Bronze Garden Vase with Two Dragons from the Gardens of Versailles

Claude Ballin the Elder

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Design for a large garden vase in the shape of an urn, executed in bronze for the gardens of Versailles after designs by Claude Ballin in about 1665. Five vases were reproduced in etchings by Jean Le Pautre in the following decade, with individual prints dated 1672 and 1673. Through the prints, Ballin's garden vases became popular throughout Europe and are known in numerous seventeenth- and eighteenth-century copies. This drawing was acquired with two others by the same hand. Two follow the known vases from Versailles, but a third sheet (2014.483) shows an additional design that is not represented by the prints, and may or may not have been executed.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Bronze Garden Vase with Two Dragons from the Gardens of VersaillesBronze Garden Vase with Two Dragons from the Gardens of VersaillesBronze Garden Vase with Two Dragons from the Gardens of VersaillesBronze Garden Vase with Two Dragons from the Gardens of VersaillesBronze Garden Vase with Two Dragons from the Gardens of Versailles

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.