Profile portrait of a woman

Joseph Jean Bernard

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Bernard was born in Luneville, in the duchy of Lorraine, in what is today eastern France. He became writing master to King Stanislas, the exiled king of Poland, who had established a court in Luneville. After Stanislas’s death in 1766, Bernard moved to Paris where he developed a style of portraiture that set the profiles of sitters in elaborate frames that merged calligraphic flourishes with naturalistic observation. In this portrait of an unidentified woman, the sitter is nearly eclipsed by the multiple ornamental frames.

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