Manet's Studio in the Batignolles

Henri Fantin-Latour

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This drawing depicts Fantin-Latour’s circle of friends and fellow practitioners of Impressionism. The artist made it as a preparatory study for a painting exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1870. Édouard Manet is seated before his easel. Surrounding him are other artists, critics, and writers of the Batignolles Group, named after the Paris district where they often convened to discuss ideas. Included are artists Auguste Renoir, Jean-Frédéric Bazille, and Claude Monet, sculptor and journalist Zacharie Astruc, writer Émile Zola, and patron Edmond Maître. Fantin-Latour was a skilled lithographer, and it is possible that he used greasy crayons intended for drawing on slabs of limestone in the lithographic printing process to render this sketch on paper.

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