Faust

Eugène Delacroix

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This is the first of a series of seventeen illustrations supplied by Delacroix for a French translation by Albert Stapfer of part one of Goethe's Faust, published in Paris in 1828. In this scene from the Prologue in Heaven, Mephistopheles, flying above the nocturnal city skyline, comments of his recent interview with the Lord, "I like to see the Old Man now and then, / and take good care to keep on speaking terms."

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