L'Estacade à Paris

Johan Barthold Jongkind

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In the period from 1849 until 1855, the Parisian cityscape, especially the banks and bridges of the Seine, occupied Jongkind as his primary subject. The structure he sketched here is the Pont de l'Estacade, a bridge connecting the right bank to the eastern end of the Île Saint-Louis. (Various iterations of the bridge stood in this location from 1818 until 1932.) The artist used this drawing as the basis for two painted compositions, one of which he exhibited at the Salon of 1853, where it was acquired by the French State.

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