Design for a Frontispiece: A Man Guiding a Crowned Woman and her Attendants to the Entrance of a Palace

Design for a Frontispiece: A Man Guiding a Crowned Woman and her Attendants to the Entrance of a Palace

Grégoire Huret

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Huret was an inventive draftsman and printmaker who was admired for his mastery of elaborate architecture and perspective, the refinement of his figures, and the preciosity of his technique. Although its subject has yet to be identified, this recently discovered sheet is remarkable for its rich rendering of ornament and pattern. A regal young woman, apparently a queen, is led toward an ornate palace, followed by her retinue. Putti cavort in the clouds overhead bearing a banderole left blank for a title, suggesting that the drawing may have been a design for a print. The inscription at lower left indicates that a past owner believed the drawing to be by Abraham van Diepenbeeck, a seventeenth-century Flemish artist.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Design for a Frontispiece: A Man Guiding a Crowned Woman and her Attendants to the Entrance of a PalaceDesign for a Frontispiece: A Man Guiding a Crowned Woman and her Attendants to the Entrance of a PalaceDesign for a Frontispiece: A Man Guiding a Crowned Woman and her Attendants to the Entrance of a PalaceDesign for a Frontispiece: A Man Guiding a Crowned Woman and her Attendants to the Entrance of a PalaceDesign for a Frontispiece: A Man Guiding a Crowned Woman and her Attendants to the Entrance of a Palace

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.