Environs de Choisy-le-Roi

Charles-François Daubigny

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This etching of a marshy landscape southeast of Paris reproduces a painting of the same title, now lost, that Daubigny exhibited in the Salon of 1843. At this early point in his career, Daubigny made his living as an illustrator. His skills as a printmaker also enabled him to promote and circulate reproductions of his own Salon submissions. This print was published in the short-lived periodical "Les Beaux-Arts: Illustration des Arts et de la Littérature."

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