Allegory of the Arts

Joseph Marie Vien

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In his early career, Vien practiced a "Greek manner," grafting an antiquarian veneer onto his Rococo style. Many of his students, including Jacques Louis David, Pierre Peyron, Jean-Baptiste Regnault, and Joseph Benoît Suvée, would go on to develop a more severe form of Neoclassicism. In 1789, he was named to the post of director of the Académie Royale, the powerful arts organization under the Bourbon monarchy. Following the Revolution, the institution was dissolved in 1793. In 1796, at age eighty, Vien was made a member of the paintings division of the newly formed Institut de France. In this highly finished drawing made the same year, allegorical figures representing the arts are grouped around a bust of Homer and guided by the example of the antique.

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