Portrait of the artist

Alphonse Legros

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Legros was among the founding members of the Société des Aquafortistes (Society of Etchers), established in Paris in 1862. The following year, he moved to London, where he worked for the remainder of his career. As a painter, he favored religious and genre subjects in a realist style, but as a draftsman and printmaker, he specialized in landscapes and portraits of distinguished sitters. He found a ready market for his work in all media in England. Legros maintained close ties with his French colleagues and helped his friends, such as Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas, navigate the English art world.

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