Roslyn Chapel

Auguste Edouart

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

During the three years Edouart spent in Edinburgh, he completed roughly five thousand silhouettes, including works that record important sights much like his portraits that document the likenesses of their subjects. He visited nearby Rosslyn Chapel (which he has spelled "Roslyn") to create this rendering of the fifteenth-century structure’s interior in wash, to which he later added silhouettes of visitors.

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