Portrait of Jean Honoré Fragonard

Charles Louis François Le Carpentier

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This charming etching is one of the few portraits of French painter, Jean Honoré Fragonard. The portrait is a bust-length image of the artist d as an older man, presented as a roundel framed by profuse foliage. Below the portrait is a partly-overgrown illusionistic plaque bearing the artist’s name. The likeness seems to be based on a portrait by Fragonard’s sister-in-law, Marguerite Gérard, while the verdant surround pays homage to Fragonard’s series of etched bacchanals of the early 1760s.

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