The Judgment of Paris

The Judgment of Paris

baron François Gérard

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

We know from a letter from his friend, the painter Pierre Narcisse Guérin, sent from the Villa Medici in Rome, on August 8, 1804 that Gérard had begun working on a painting depicting The Judgment of Paris, a mythological tale that appears in Homer’s Iliad, in which the Trojan prince Paris judges the beauty of three goddesses, ultimately awarding the golden apple to Venus in return for her gift of Helen of Sparta. Paris’s abduction of the Spartan queen would set off the Trojan War. Gérard became frustrated with his canvas and destroyed it in 1812, salvaging only a few small fragments. This study is a record of Gérard’s composition.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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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.