Design for a Neo-Classical Building
Medium
Pen and brown ink, brush and brown wash
Dimensions
6 1/2 x 5 7/8 in. (16.5 x 14.9 cm)
Classification
Drawings|Ornament & Architecture
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1948
Accession Number
48.148(14)
Tags
Art Historical Context
This delicate architectural drawing, titled *Design for a Neo-Classical Building*, captures the elegance of 18th-century French design by an anonymous artist. Rendered in pen and brown ink with brush and brown wash on a modest sheet measuring just 6½ x 5⅞ inches, it exemplifies the precision of preparatory sketches used by architects and designers of the era. Housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Drawings and Prints department, this work from The Elisha Whittelsey Collection highlights the meticulous planning behind grand visions. Neo-Classicism, flourishing in France during the late 18t...
About the Artist
Anonymous, French, 18th century · 1700–1800
The artist known as Anonymous, French, 18th century, represents a collective of unidentified talents active roughly between 1700 and 1800, a period of profound artistic evolution in France from the opulent Rococo to the austere dawn of Neoclassicism and Revolutionary fervor. Little is documented about their personal training or mentors, as their anonymity obscures individual biographies, though th...