Seated Woman Reading, study for "Le Pélerinage"

Seated Woman Reading, study for "Le Pélerinage"

Alphonse Legros

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

After immigrating to London in 1863, Legros almost immediately found critical success and patronage he had lacked in Paris. This study of a cloaked woman reading from a missal is preparatory to The Pilgrimage (1871, Walker Art Gallery). After Philip Henry Rathbone (1828–1895), a prominent collector in Liverpool, purchased the work almost immediately, the artist continued with a series of major paintings of Breton women observing religious ceremonies. The first owner of this drawing was Auguste Poulet-Malassis, author of the catalogue raisonné of Legros’s etchings, published in 1877.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Seated Woman Reading, study for "Le Pélerinage"Seated Woman Reading, study for "Le Pélerinage"Seated Woman Reading, study for "Le Pélerinage"Seated Woman Reading, study for "Le Pélerinage"Seated Woman Reading, study for "Le Pélerinage"

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.