L'Homme à la pipe

Marcellin Desboutin

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Desboutin was broke when he arrived in Paris in 1872. He quickly turned to printmaking, specializing in portraits of his contemporaries, which earned him from one to two hundred francs each. This life-size self-portrait, unusually large and heavily worked, presents the artist as a bohemian, an image already established by Edouard Manet in a full-length portrait of 1875 (Museu de Arte de São Paulo). Here, rather than representing himself with the traditional tools of his trade, he holds a pipe as his only accessory. He gazes directly over his shoulder; his disheveled hair is barely contained under his cap. Recognized by many as Desboutin’s masterpiece, this print was awarded a third-class medal at the Salon of 1879 and a medal of honor at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle.

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