Arab Woman

Gustave Boulanger

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Boulanger began producing works of Orientalist subjects following his first visit to Algeria in 1845. He returned to North Africa multiple times throughout his career, including a trip with his friend Jean-Léon Gérôme in 1872. This refined study demonstrates both the artist’s ethnographic interest in costume and his sacrifice of a degree of detail in favor of evoking the model’s pensive mood.

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