Officer and Laughing Girl, after Vermeer

Jules-Ferdinand Jacquemart

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The "Gazette des Beaux-Arts" first published this etching as an illustration to an article on Vermeer by Théophile Thoré-Bürger. The French collector Léopold Double owned the painting at the time, which accounts for the etched crest below the image. This was Jacquemart’s first successful foray into reproducing a painting, after specializing previously in three-dimensional objects. He included an impression of this print in the selection of works he exhibited at the 1867 Exposition Universelle, where he earned a third-class medal.

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