Paestum

Jean-Léon Gérôme

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Gérôme followed his teacher Paul Delaroche to Italy in 1843, where he was captivated by the antique ruins of Pompeii and the region further south, including Paestum. When he made his successful debut at the Paris Salon of 1847, he was already at work developing this composition featuring the east façade of the Temple of Hera, based on drawings he made on-site. He continued working on the subject over the next five years. He showed a variation at the Salon of 1849 (absent the water buffalo), and yet another version at the Salon of 1852, where it earned praise from the Goncourt brothers. This ambitious, large-scale preparatory drawing most closely relates to the earliest known oil sketch of 1847 (private collection). It is highly refined in technique, but also shows evidence of the artist’s working method with perspectival lines, corrections, and suggestive ideas.

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