Design for Two Vases

Anonymous, French

Pen and brown and gray ink, watercolor, and black chalk

Metropolitan Museum of Art

This refined ornamental drawing presents two elaborately conceived vase designs rendered in pen and brown and gray ink, watercolor, and black chalk. Attributable to an anonymous French designer of the late eighteenth century, the sheet exemplifies the period's enthusiasm for Neoclassical decorative arts, in which vase forms became central symbols of the revived interest in antiquity following the excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii. Handwritten inscriptions in French note that the depicted pieces are of a beautiful light blue tending toward green, with flower bouquets in slight relief, suggesting the drawing served as a design proposal likely intended for ceramic manufacture. The work belongs to a distinguished tradition of French ornament drawing in which artists and craftsmen invested utilitarian objects with classical refinement and beauty, characteristic of France's Age of Enlightenment.