As part of its 150th-anniversary celebration, The Met invited a group of artists with strong ties to the Museum to contribute original prints to The Met 150 portfolio. While COVID-19 inevitably delayed production, its publication in 2021 marks a different anniversary: 150 years since the Museum first commissioned prints from a living artist. Although The Met 150 portfolio is considerably more global in scope, the 1871 project was also an international affair—initiated in Brussels, printed in Paris, published in London, and sold in New York. Executed during a period of political and social turbulence, the Jacquemart portfolio stands as an important precedent that demonstrates the Museum's longstanding engagement with contemporary practitioners and the print medium even prior to the formation of the Department of Prints in 1916.
In 1871, the newly established Metropolitan Museum of Art engaged preeminent French etcher Jules Jacquemart to create a series of prints reproducing paintings from the founding collection. Jacquemart made his name producing still-life etchings and illustrations of objects. [1] He received great acclaim for the sixty plates he contributed to Henry Barbet de Jouy’s Les gemmes et joyaux de la couronne (The Crown Jewels, 1865), a catalogue of the most important Medieval and Renaissance decorative objects in the French royal collection.
Each plate in The Crown Jewels displays Jacquemart’s virtuosic ability to describe the variety of precious materials, their textures, as well as the play of light on their surfaces. For example, the polished surface of an antique carnelian vase reveals a reflected view of the Louvre through the window of the palace’s studio where the artist worked directly from the objects. He earned two medals for the prints when he exhibited them at the Salons of 1865 and 1866.
Left: Jules-Ferdinand Jacquemart (French, 1837–1880). Antique Carnelian Vase, 1864. Etching, sheet: 19 5/16 × 14 9/16 in. (49 × 37 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Howard Mansfield, 1917 (17.6.2) Right: Jules-Ferdinand Jacquemart (French, 1837–1880). Officer and Laughing Girl, after Vermeer, ca. 1866. Etching, sheet: 19 1/8 × 13 7/8 in. (48.5 × 35.3 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Theodore De Witt, 1923 (23.65.1)
From three-dimensional objects, Jacquemart turned to paintings as a challenge to his skill with the etching needle. His first successful etching after a painting, Vermeer’s Soldier and the Laughing Girl, appeared in 1866 in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, an art journal that played a significant role in promoting etching.
The Met’s first print commission was integrally tied to the purchase that year of 174 paintings for the fledgling institution. Against the backdrop of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War and due, at least in part, to the destabilizing impact of that conflict, William Tilden Blodgett, the first Vice President of the Board and Chairman of the Executive Committee, acquired three groups of old master paintings while visiting Europe in the late summer and early fall. He bought two of these collections in Paris from Belgian dealer Léon Gauchez, who likely conceived of the print project for the Museum and suggested Jacquemart as the artist. [2]
With the onset of the Siege of Paris in September, Blodgett and Gauchez fled to Brussels. Jacquemart, meanwhile, enlisted in the National Guard to defend the French capital as one of the tirailleurs de la Seine, a brigade of sharpshooters that included a number of artists, among them fellow etcher James Tissot. Jacquemart remained in the city through much of the Commune—the popular uprising against the royalist-leaning government—but left with his family for Brussels during the Bloody Week that marked its brutal suppression.
According to a receipt in The Met’s archives, Gauchez made his first recorded payment to the etcher on May 23, 1871, presumably while they were both in Belgium. Back in Paris by autumn, the etcher gave his plates to François Liénard to print an initial one hundred sets in mid-November. They were officially published by print sellers P. & D. Colnaghi & Co. in London that December. Although the publisher’s circular announced the project as an ongoing series, it never advanced beyond the first group of ten prints.