NEW ORLEANS.- The New Orleans Museum of Art presents A View To The Past: Old Master Prints and Drawings offers Museum visitors a rare opportunity to peer into the distant past from their contemporary vantage point. There they will discover many important, intriguing and sometimes rare objects fashioned by some of the most distinguished creators in the history of Western art. The 85 works on view in this presentation, drawn from the New Orleans Museum of Art's holdings and several private collections, range from the early 16th- to the mid-19th century.

The exhibition will unveil three newly donated and very important prints by Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (Dutch, 1606-1669. "An anonymous New York benefactor has honored NOMA with a generous gift of three early Rembrandt etchings of exceptional quality," said Daniel Piersol, NOMA's Doris Zemurray Stone Curator of Prints and Drawings. "These marvelous impressions are the first Rembrandts to enter the permanent collection, and are the stars among stars in this exhibition."

While many often associate the term "Old Master" with painting and sculpture, it applies no less to drawings and prints created in a broad range of media. To be sure, such drawings are the result of diverse aesthetic intents. For instance, the undated sanguine rendering, Romulus et Remus, by Jean-Jacques-Francois Le Barbier (1738-1826), is an image intended to be transformed into a print. Eugene Delacroix's (1798-1863) ink Studies of Sculptures (ca. 1830) is this creator's interpretation of existing three-dimensional objects. Portrait of a Gentleman, 1809, by Virginie Hue de Bravel (1780-1840), is a fully-realized, finished work, complete in and of itself.

Etchings, woodcuts, engravings and lithographs can be printed or "pulled" in various quantities or editions, depending upon the durability of the printing matrix of stone, copper or wood. This inherent multiplicity alone sets a print apart from a drawing. Old master prints, like the drawings, served a variety of purposes. For instance, Portrait of Louis XVI, 1790, by Johann Gotthard Muller (ca. 1747-1830), is an engraving after a painting. The purpose of this reproductive print was to make available for distribution throughout his domain the official image of the King of France. Muller was, then, an engraver whose skill lay in translating an existing works from one medium into another. Francisco Goya (1746-1828) and Albrecht Durer (1471-1528), in contrast, conceived of and executed their prints as multiple, original compositions, independent from their unique creations in painting. Durer's great pictorial inventiveness and powerful content are apparent in the woodcut entitled Hercules Conquering Cacus, ca. 1496-98, while Goya's emotional distress and sense of outrage nearly burst from his haunting etching, Tampoco, ca. 1819.

Of special interest among the many noteworthy works on view are those by the preeminent Dutch etcher, Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (1606-1669), and Jean-Marc Nattier (1685-1766), a favored portrait painter of the French court and aristocracy.

While he has long been recognized as an important painter, Rembrandt's achievements as a printmaker are no less remarkable and remain inimitable. Indeed, in 1751, his became the first prints cataloged by a dealer, intimating their importance relative to the creator's output in other media. The artist brought to the relatively young technique of etching (its origins dating from the early 16th century) an open-minded, restlessly inventive outlook. In his inexhaustible creative quest, Rembrandt employed a range of printing inks and papers; varied techniques to wipe the etching plates; and experimented with the process of "biting," or immersing the printing matrix in an acid bath.

Not only was Rembrandt's technical mastery of etching unsurpassed, the breadth of his subject matter was extraordinary. Rembrandt's searching portraits and handsome landscapes of the Amsterdam environs remained popular even after his paintings were out of favor; the genre scenes, especially of the city's downtrodden, are compassionate. A man quite conversant with a wide range of theological convictions, he channeled this knowledge into marvelous religious images.

Three small, jewel-like biblical impressions, The Circumcision of Christ: Small Plate, ca. 1630; The Holy Family, 1632; and the nocturne entitled The Flight into Egypt: Small Plate, 1633, glow with dramatic, ethereal contrasts of light and shadow. Dark prints such as these, derived from the Caravaggio-esque approach explored by 17th-century Dutch artists, were prized by collectors of the day. The Circumcision, with its careful draftsmanship, grand costumes and the slightly equivocal spatial relationships between the figures who crowd into the temple, is characteristic of this master's early etched work. Typical of Rembrandt's early religious work is a heightened sense of physical and emotional tension, evoked here by the frightened child's scream.

Jean-Marc Nattier was from a family of artists, which also included his father, Marc (1642-1702); mother, Marie Courtois (1655-1703); and brother, Jean-Baptiste (1678-1726). He studied at the Academie Royal, where he won the Premier Prix de Dessin, and early in his career was commissioned to make drawings for engravers. His fastidious, exacting style, described by one 18th-century French collector as "cold," was extremely well-suited to this purpose. Nattier later traveled to Holland, where he painted portraits of Peter the Great and Empress Catherine of Russia. The artist continued his career in Paris, where he painted all the members of the royal family as well as many courtiers and diplomats.

Nattier's remarkable Portrait of Sir Peter Paul Rubens (After a Self-Portrait of the Artist), 1707, likely reveals Nattier's high regard for Rubens. This image was executed at the same point that the artist and his brother had assumed from their father the task of copying the great series of Rubens paintings, History of Marie de Medici, which then hung at the Palais du Luxembourg. Their drawings were published as engravings in 1710 as La Galerie du Palais du Luxembourg Peintre par Rubens. The current drawing, engraved as the volume's frontispiece by Jean Audran (1661-1721), will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's work, to be written by Nattier authority Joseph Baillol and published by the Wildenstein Foundation.