Fan Design with Republican Assignats (French Revolutionary Money)

Anonymous, French, 18th century

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Printed in the mid-1790s, the illusionist collage of crisp French Republican monetary notes, or assignats, adorning this fan design would have signaled the user's anti-royalist sympathies. Significantly, the one note with a bent corner, and dated 1791, contains a portrait medallion of the dethroned and imprisoned Louis XVI. The whole design is surrounded by stylishly up-to-date neoclassical ornament, including a panel of Greek key design, another of coins and two terms bearing the head of Mercury, the guardian of finance.

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