Drawing of a Knife and Sheath

The drawing is a precise and elegant rendering of an ivory-mounted Romantic Revival knife and sheath in sixteenth-century style in The Met’s collection, acc. no. 17.190.300a, b, the gift of J. Pierpont Morgan in 1917. The work of the painter, draftsman, and engraver E. H. Langlois (1777–1837), the drawing was prepared as an illustration in N. X. Willemin’s ambitious antiquarian publication of medieval and Renaissance works of art in France, Monuments francais inedits, which was issued in fifty installments between 1806 and 1839. The drawing, and perhaps the ivory dagger itself, belonged to Langlois’s friend Nicolas-Xavier Willemin (1767–1833), who sold the drawing to the English antiquary Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1776–1847) in 1818. The drawing was reproduced as an illustration in Dibdin’s A Bibliographical Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, first published in 1821, and it was again reproduced in a colored engraving in the last installment of Willemin’s book in 1839.

The actual knife and its sheath, probably the work of Dieppe ivory carvers, is an early example of romantic revival taste. It exhibits a sophisticated knowledge of sixteenth-century French Renaissance ornament and figure style and, from its earliest publication, was apocryphally known as the “knife of Diane de Poitiers,” referring to the famous mistress of King Henry II of France (r. 1547–59).