Traveler, Your Passport?, from Pastorales (Romance of Country Life)

Honoré Daumier

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The confrontation between a stern officer and a portly bourgeois man with his son in the woods attests to a moment of heightened control by the French government under the authoritarian rule of King Louis Philippe I. Citizens were required to carry a passport for travel within France, even for short distances, which Daumier satirizes in this scene of a leisurely country stroll abruptly interrupted. This proof impression bears creases from having been folded in four, most likely when it was sent between the printer and the caption writer.

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