Portrait of a Young Man (recto); Sketch of a Venus (verso)

Richard Parkes Bonington

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This portrait drawing has been attributed to Richard Parkes Bonington and the features, hairstyle and dress suggest that, if by his hand, the sheet may be a self-portrait—those elements are all similar to a self-portrait in oils of 1825 (Collection of Gabriel Renand), and also echo a small chalk drawing by Louis-Léopold Boilly titled "The Students of Baron Gros," 1820 (Musée Carnavalet). Bonington was an important landscape painter who worked both in watercolors and oils, which makes the possibility that he drew this sheet intriguing.

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