The Arrival of His Royal Highness The Duke of Bordeaux at Chambord

Jean-Baptiste Isabey

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

J.B. Isabey portrays a crowd gathered on a public square in Chambord and celebrating the arrival of the infant Duke of Bordeaux, with a procession of girls carrying flowers and presenting them to the boy, who is held by a woman while his mother, the Duchess of Berry, is getting off a carriage which is standing under a canopy decorated with flowers. In the right foreground, street-traders sell food and drinks; in the background, one can see the château of Chambord.

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