Drawings Collection

Drawings have a more intimate character than any other form of artistic expression. Often they represent an artist’s first thoughts, hastily and spontaneously noted on the paper. They reveal his self-assurance or his hesitancy in the search for a solution that makes a reality of his first idea. They enable us, in a sense, to participate in the artist’s act of creation…

The Getty Museum’s collection of drawings was begun in 1981 with the purchase of a Rembrandt nude; it has since become one of the world’s most important repositories of European works from the fifteenth through the nineteenth century. …

This exhibition of eighteenth-century Italian drawings is the most extensive in the series intended to show all the drawings in the Robert Lehman Collection…

This is the fourth exhibition in a series through which all the drawings in the Robert Lehman Collection will eventually be shown. The sixty-six works represent all our holdings by the seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish masters. …

The Metropolitan Museum began acquiring American drawings and watercolors in 1880, just ten years after its founding. Since then it has amassed more than 1,500 works executed by American artists during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in watercolor, pastel, chalk, ink, graphite, gouache, and charcoal. Roughly a third of the collection is by John Singer Sargent and was published as a single volume in 2000. …