Portrait of Madame Roland

Gilles Louis Chrétien

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In addition to hosting a salon that was an important meeting place for revolutionary politicians in Paris, Madame Roland played a powerful role behind the scenes by writing speeches and letters for her husband, Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière, who became minister of the interior in 1792. As a moderate Girondin, she opposed the violence of the more radical Jacobins and was arrested at the outset of the Terror, a period when thousands of perceived enemies of the Revolution were executed. Roland wrote her memoirs from prison before she was guillotined. During her lifetime, she sat for multiple physionotraces, a silhouette portrait technique invented by Chrétien.

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