Collection: Classic Drawings & Etchings

Drawing and etching are the underlying disciplines of Western art before the camera. From the silverpoint studies of fifteenth century Florentine workshops through the great printmaking tradition of seventeenth century Holland and Italy and the academic draftsmanship of nineteenth century Paris, both media trained the eye and the hand that the larger painted commissions then put to work. They are also, taken on their own terms, an autonomous body of art.

Three figures define the height of the tradition. Albrecht Dürer raised engraving to a level of technical and conceptual ambition the medium had never seen, working through Apocalypse cycles, the great Master engravings of 1513 and 1514, and the woodcut book illustration that made his reputation across Europe. Rembrandt van Rijn made etching a mature autonomous medium in the seventeenth century, returning to copper plates for years and reworking states until each composition reached the psychological depth he wanted. Goya's Caprichos and Disasters of War carried the medium into the modern political realm a century later.

Academic draftsmanship, the patient training in cast drawing, anatomy, and perspective that ran from the Florentine Accademia del Disegno in 1563 through to the late nineteenth century Parisian École des Beaux Arts, produced the technical foundation for almost every painter's career, including those who later left it behind. The Salon entries of Jean-Léon Gérôme and William-Adolphe Bouguereau are the best evidence of how far that training could be pushed.

The prints gathered here include drypoint, intaglio printmaking, and Old Master drawings reproduced through later engraved editions. The collection sits beside the gallery's Renaissance and Baroque & Chiaroscuro holdings, the periods that produced the canonical material at the heart of the tradition.