Drawings Collection

For insight into daily life in France in the eighteenth century, architectural and ornament drawings provide compelling visual documentation. This catalogue of eighteenth-century French drawings selected from The Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection testifies to the peerless efforts on the part of artists and craftsmen of Frances Age of Enlightenment to invest utilitarian objects with refinement and beauty. …

The Getty Museum’s collection of drawings was begun in 1981 with the purchase of a Rembrandt nude and has since become an important repository of European works from the fifteenth through the nineteenth century. As in the first volume devoted to the collection (published in 1988 in English and Italian editions), the text is organized first by national school, then alphabetically by artist, with individual works arranged chronologically.