Madame Royale Cared for by Doctor Brunier, January 24, 1793

Jean-Baptiste Mallet

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Mallet here depicts a poignant scene of the incarceration of the royal family during the Terror. The king, Louis XVI had been guillotined 3 days earlier. The doctor who took care of the children of the royal family, Pierre Edouard Brunier, visits the prison to care for the swollen foot of Marie-Thérèse, called ‘Madame Royale.’ The fourteen-year-old girl sits at the center, clad in white, with a portrait miniature of her father hanging from a chain around her neck. Just alongside sits her mother, the Austrian-born queen, Marie-Antoinette, who would be executed later that year. The cold gray stone of the walls and ceiling and the simple wooden furniture stand in stark contrast to the sumptuous furnishings of Versailles that the family had been forced to leave behind.

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