Alexander the Great presenting Campaspe to Apelles

Alexander the Great presenting Campaspe to Apelles

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In this drawing, which dates to Ingres’s last year as a student at the Académie de France in Rome, Alexander the Great (at center) offers his favorite mistress, Campaspe, to Apelles, the painter from whom he had commissioned her portrait. According to the narrative from Pliny’s "Natural History," over the course of the sittings, the painter had fallen in love with his subject, prompting Alexander to present Campaspe to him as a sign of his esteem. Adopting a friezelike composition suited to the classical subject matter, Ingres achieved the crisp contours of the figures by cutting the composition in silhouette and pasting it onto brown-washed paper. Ingres never pursued the subject in paint and so likely intended this drawing as a finished work.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Alexander the Great presenting Campaspe to ApellesAlexander the Great presenting Campaspe to ApellesAlexander the Great presenting Campaspe to ApellesAlexander the Great presenting Campaspe to ApellesAlexander the Great presenting Campaspe to Apelles

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.