The Painter

Jan Josef Horemans the Elder

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This wonderful mezzotint after a painting by Horemans shows an artist at his easel within his busy studio. On the right apprentices grind pigments and sharpen tools while another boy sits and draws. Near the painter, an elegantly dressed couple, presumably his clients, chat while a maid fills the painter’s glass of wine. Paintings hang on the walls and a violin, a recorder, and music sheet lie on a table on the right, indicating the painter’s other artistic talents. The composition is typical of the work of the Flemish painter Jan Josef Horemans who produced numerous images of everyday life bustling within shallow, stage-like settings.

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