Portrait of Berthe Morisot

Marcellin Desboutin

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Desboutin and Berthe Morisot both participated in the second Impressionist exhibition in the spring of 1876, though they almost certainly met earlier through their mutual friends Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas. In this print, Desboutin demonstrates the range of tones achievable in his preferred medium of drypoint—a technique in which the artist scratches the copperplate directly with a sharp needle. He juxtaposed the highly worked, rich blacks of Morisot’s dress, hair, and eyes with the faint outline of her armchair and the fashionable Japanese fan in her hands.

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