European Drawings 1

Within a short time the Department of Drawings has acquired impressive holdings of European works on paper. This volume, the first in a series intended to keep scholars apprised of acquisitions, contains 149 entries on Italian, French, Flemish, Dutch, and other works ranging in date from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century. Artists represented include Rembrandt, Cezanne, Blake, Goya, Dürer, Savery, Rubens, Millet, Veronese, Caravaggio, Raphael, and numerous others. All drawings are illustrated at full-page size.

The collection of drawings at the Getty Museum was started in 1981 with the purchase of Rembrandt’s Nude Woman with a Snake and has steadily expanded since then, so that now, at the turn of the new millennium, it stands at more than six hundred drawings and is, sheet for sheet, one of the best anywhere. The Getty goal is to create from the finest examples a collection of the different Western European schools of drawing before 1900, with special emphasis on the work of the most important and accomplished draftsmen. The collection now contains superb examples of the work of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Dürer, Rembrandt, Claude Lorraine, Watteau, Gainsborough, David, Millet, Manet, Van Gogh, and Degas. This is the fourth in the series of catalogues describing the drawings in the Getty Museum. Most of the drawings discussed in the present volume were chosen for the collection in the period of 1994 to 1998 and include examples from the Italian, German, Dutch and Flemish, French, Spanish, and British schools. Also included are several gifts from private collectors, which mark the start of a tradition that, it is hoped, will continue in the future. The catalogue entries for these new acquisitions are organized first by national school and then by artist. The book also includes a bibliography and indexes of artists, former owners, related drawings, prints, and works in other media.

"Early European art was a consuming interest of both Robert Lehman and his father, Philip Lehman, an interest reflected in the remarkable number and quality of drawings they owned from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. In addition to an important group of early German drawings, the collection includes a "Saint Paul" from a series associated with Jan van Eyck and the famous "Scupstoel" from the circle of Rogier van der Weyden, the only design for a decorative sculpture to survive from the fifteenth century. The great artists of the seventeenth century, Peter Paul Rubens, Jacob Jordaens, Claude Lorrain, and Rembrandt among them, are also represented, Rembrandt by seven drawings, including the large study of Leonardo's "Last Supper" that would stay in his mind all through his career. Drawings by Antoine Watteau, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, Thomas Gainsborough, Paul Sandby, and George Romney are among the many from eighteenth-century France and England. The volume discusses all 153 drawings at length, placing each in its art historical setting and complementing the discussion with comparative illustrations of related works." This e-book on the MetPublications website is also accompanied by links to related works and under the "Additional resources"tab are links to Met works of art and Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History essays and timelines (viewed May 1, 2014).

Central Europe occupies a prominent place in many realms of eighteenth-century culture. This volume is the catalogue of an exhibition of drawings, organized in 1989 by The Art Museum, Princeton University, which presents some of the little-known accomplishments of artists from the region of present-day East and West Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and parts of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. Providing the first available survey of drawings of the period in English, the illustrated introduction to the catalogue considers the works in historical and artistic context. The book includes important drawings by artists such as Cosmas Damian Asam, Egid Quirin Asam, Matthus Gnther, and Adrian Zingg. Published for the first time are unique drawings by such important sculptors as Georg Raphael Donner and Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. The fully illustrated catalogue contains 105 entries, many of which deal with major issues of art of the time and treat the drawings exhibited in relation to works elsewhere. Biographies are presented for all the artists exhibited.

Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Apr. 3-Sept. 3, 2012.