CategoriesStyles and Movements
Old Master Drawings and Prints
European drawings and prints from about 1400 to 1800, from chalk studies and pen sketches to woodcuts, engravings and etchings.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Old Master Drawings and Prints are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Works on paper show most directly how European artists between about 1400 and 1800 thought and trained. Drawings served many purposes: quick sketches, studies of hands and drapery, compositional ideas, full-size cartoons for transfer, and finished sheets made as gifts. The medium helps date them: silverpoint on prepared paper in the 15th century, pen and brown ink with wash, and the red and black chalks Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Antoine Watteau used to model flesh.
Prints multiplied images. Woodcut and engraving spread from Germany and Italy in the 15th century, and Albrecht Dürer's Melencolia I (1514) showed how much a copper plate could hold. Etching, drawn through a wax ground and bitten with acid, gave Rembrandt van Rijn a freer line and Giovanni Battista Piranesi's Imaginary Prisons (c. 1750) their theatrical gloom. Look for plate marks, watermarks and states, the successive stages of a reworked plate.
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