"We're wearing lots of flowers this spring, especially on hats" (Fashionable Magazine), plate IX from the suite The English At Home, from Masks and Faces

"We're wearing lots of flowers this spring, especially on hats" (Fashionable Magazine), plate IX from the suite The English At Home, from Masks and Faces

Paul Gavarni [Chevalier]

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

One of the most successful lithographers of the nineteenth century, Gavarni first made a name for himself contributing illustrations to fashion magazines. Even as he shifted his focus to satirical lithography, his preferred subjects remained balls, costume, and fancy dress. The subject of this stone, the matrix from which a lithograph is printed, pokes fun at English style. "The English at Home," a series of twenty prints, forms a subset of a much larger suite, "Masks and Faces," published once daily over the course of a year in the journal "Le Paris" after Gavarni returned from a visit to London in 1851.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

"We're wearing lots of flowers this spring, especially on hats" (Fashionable Magazine), plate IX from the suite The English At Home, from Masks and Faces"We're wearing lots of flowers this spring, especially on hats" (Fashionable Magazine), plate IX from the suite The English At Home, from Masks and Faces"We're wearing lots of flowers this spring, especially on hats" (Fashionable Magazine), plate IX from the suite The English At Home, from Masks and Faces"We're wearing lots of flowers this spring, especially on hats" (Fashionable Magazine), plate IX from the suite The English At Home, from Masks and Faces"We're wearing lots of flowers this spring, especially on hats" (Fashionable Magazine), plate IX from the suite The English At Home, from Masks and Faces

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.