Four Designs of Costume Accessories
Medium
Pen and black ink, graphite, gouache
Dimensions
Sheet: 6 11/16 x 9 15/16 in. (17 x 25.3 cm)
Classification
Ornament & Architecture|Drawings
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1957
Accession Number
57.559.6(14v)
Art Historical Context
This delicate sheet, *Four Designs of Costume Accessories captures the elegance of late 18th-century French fashion through meticulous sketches dated around 1785–90. Attributed to an anonymous French of the period, with possible later contributions from Antoine Caire-Morand another anonymous 19th-century, it features four refined designs likely for jewelry, buckles, or ornamental pins. Housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Drawings Prints department as part of The Elisha Whittelsey Collection (quired 1957), small-scale work (6 11/16 x 9 15/16 in.) exemplifies the ornamental drawings that ...
About the Artist
Anonymous, French, 18th century|Antoine Caire-Morand|Anonymous, French, 19th 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...