View of the cross on the road entering Cintra

View of the cross on the road entering Cintra

Clementine de Brelaz

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Sintra (Cintra) is a summer resort near Lisbon on the 'Portuguese Riviera' that historically has been frequented by the royal family and the nobility. Much of the architecture is in the neo-Renaissance style built in the nineteenth century.　 This is from a collection of picturesque views of Sintra by the lithographer and sometime painter Clementine de Brelaz. She was born in Lisbon in 1811, and migrated to Switzerland, as a Protestant convert. According to Carl Brun (Schweizerisches Künstler Lexikon), Brelaz was taught in Geneva by the Swiss landscape painter Alexandre Calame (1810–64), presumably during the 1830s. The series of plates are from a set of 18 with a title ‘Coquis de Cintra: Dessines d’apres et lithographies par CNE B.’, Lisbon, Litografia de Manuel Luis, 1840.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

View of the cross on the road entering CintraView of the cross on the road entering CintraView of the cross on the road entering CintraView of the cross on the road entering CintraView of the cross on the road entering Cintra

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.