Woman at the Spinning Wheel

Woman at the Spinning Wheel

Jules Breton

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Devoted to his native region of Artois in Northern France, Breton found success as a realist painter depicting rural life there. This elderly spinner appears in the lower left of his painting "Le Dernier Rayon" (The Last Ray of Sunshine), 1885 (current location unknown). Breton’s wife Elodie recorded that her husband began this drawing early in the morning on March 24, 1884, sketching a local woman by the name of Colette. The artist combined fabricated black crayons of various densities, using a remarkably assured, hard, thin line over a softer initial sketch. He depicts her looking over her shoulder while her hands continue her work. In the final composition, she glances toward family members returning home from their labor in the fields.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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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.