Anne, ma soeur Anne, ne vois-tu rien venir?

Anne, ma soeur Anne, ne vois-tu rien venir?

Auguste Garneray

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Part of an artistic family, Garneray was a drawing instructor to members of the Bonaparte family and designed costumes for the opera. He is best known today for watercolors in a Troubadour style, a reaction against Neoclassicism that drew primarily upon medieval and Renaissance subjects. This work presents a scene from Charles Perrault’s story "La Barbe Bleue" (Bluebeard, 1697). In a meticulously rendered gothic setting, Bluebeard’s young wife kneels by the doorway at left with her hands clasped, preparing to beg for his forgiveness for her disobedience. At the center of the composition, her sister Anne, in blue, looks out the open window. An inscription below the image quotes a famous line from the text: "Anne, sister Anne, do you see anyone coming?"

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Anne, ma soeur Anne, ne vois-tu rien venir?Anne, ma soeur Anne, ne vois-tu rien venir?Anne, ma soeur Anne, ne vois-tu rien venir?Anne, ma soeur Anne, ne vois-tu rien venir?Anne, ma soeur Anne, ne vois-tu rien venir?

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.