The Pardon of Saint-Anne-La-Palud

Eugène Boudin

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Boudin described this scene in a letter to his brother: "Imagine an immense plain… in the middle, a small gothic chapel surrounded by trees… around that a hundred tents made of white canvas… in open-air kitchens huge pots of boiling soup, incredible ragouts..." Rather than depict the sacred procession of the Pardon of Saint-Anne-la-Palud, a major religious festival in Brittany that Boudin witnessed during a visit to the region in 1857, the artist chose to sketch the animated preparations for the celebratory picnic with the Chapel of Saint-Anne-la-Palud in the background. Boudin ultimately selected this subject for his first major painting and Salon début in 1859. Although Charles Baudelaire praised the picture, the painter was unsatisfied, writing in his journal that the finished canvas lacked "grandeur, suppleness, and novelty." This drawing retains the vitality that Boudin feared lost in the final work.

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