Quai Voltaire

Giuseppe De Nittis

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In 1874, De Nittis joined the Société des Aquafortistes (Society of Etchers) in Paris—the same year his friend Edgar Degas invited him to participate in the first Impressionist exhibition. This print from two years later shows the artist’s investigation of the alliance between printmaking techniques and the aesthetic priorities of Impressionism. To convey atmospheric effects in this view along the Seine, De Nittis selectively wiped the ink on the copperplate before printing it.

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