The Moerdyck, after Jan van Goyen

Jules-Ferdinand Jacquemart

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Among the ten works included in Jacquemart’s portfolio of etchings celebrating the founding purchase of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this is the only painting that is no longer in the collection. For reasons of condition, it was deaccessioned in 1989. In his review of the plate, the British critic and etching advocate, Philip Gilbert Hamerton admired the frankness of the "bare etched line" and the "varied employment of it" such that the print "suggests everything of the picture but its colour."

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