Staircase of the Grand Tower, Harcourt Castle

Jean-Baptiste Isabey

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A man, holding a cane and hat in one hand, helps a woman down a limestone stairway which is lit from the left by a ray of light that pours onto the figures through a small arrow-slit window. Both figures are dressed in Louis XIV style clothing. The stairwell depicted here is located in the Harcourt castle (Lillebonne, France).This print was part of a series entitled 'Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l'ancienne France' which is a survey of France's national heritage conducted by Charles Nodier, Baron Taylor and Alphonse de Cailleux, and is abundantly illustrated by lithographs. This ambitious project, which required sending about a hundred artists to different regions of France, was published in a series of twenty-one volumes between 1821 and 1878.

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