Frontispiece from "Voyage en bateau"

Charles-François Daubigny

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

For his frontispiece for the series "Voyage en bateau," devoted to anecdotes about life aboard his floating studio, Daubigny chose to focus on the flora and fauna one might find along the river's edge. Tall reeds frame the title, while frogs chase insects among the waterlilies below. Two preparatory drawings in the collection reveal how Daubigny progressed with his composition to arrive at this final design (2018.11.1 and (2018.11.2).

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