Rocky Landscape with Figures

Augustin Pajou

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This sheet was made by the French sculptor Augustin Pajou while he was a pensionnaire at the French Academy in Rome between 1752 and 1756. On the recto, he sketched (or copied?) a rocky landscape with figures. On the verso, he sketched two quick designs for a cartouche with the king’s arms intended for the façade of the Palazzo Mancini in Rome, home of the French Academy. The cartouche, commissioned in 1753, was never realized.

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