SARASOTA, FL.- The Yale University Art Gallery will display important examples from its European drawings collection in a new traveling exhibition. Master Drawings from the Yale University Art Gallery provides a compelling survey of European draftsmanship from the late fifteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, featuring a substantial number of works that have never been seen by the general public. Traveling exhibitions such as Master Drawings are a means of making the Gallery’s collections available to a broad public.

Including masterworks by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, François Boucher, Edgar Degas, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri), Jacob Jordaens, Claude Lorrain, Domenico Tiepolo, and Jean-Antoine Watteau, as well as by many lesser-known artists, the exhibition begins its tour at The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida (October 19, 2006–January 7, 2007). It will then be presented at the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin (June 1–August 12, 2007). The final venue is the Yale University Art Gallery (February 12–June 8, 2008).

Master Drawings from the Yale University Art Gallery is the first full exploration of the breadth and depth of the Gallery’s collection of European drawings since 1970, when Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann and Anne-Marie Logan published a complete catalogue of the collection’s European drawings made before 1900. Selected from the Gallery’s holdings of more than one thousand old master drawings, the exhibition features drawings from all of Europe, with France, Italy, and the Netherlands prominently represented. With almost forty percent of the works on view acquired since the publication of the 1970 catalogue—including eighteen drawings acquired within the past five years—the exhibition provides viewers with an up-to-date look at this significant collection.

Jock Reynolds, the Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Yale University Art Gallery, comments, “The Gallery’s collection of European drawings offers an intimate view across a broad range of artistic ideas and working methods. A collection-based exhibition such as this one is exciting to assemble, for it propels new research and scholarship, which in turn prompts a teaching museum such as ours to further strengthen its holdings. We are delighted to be able to share these works, seldom viewed beyond our very active print room, with two other university museums and the public at large.”

The exhibition and its accompanying publication have been organized by Suzanne Boorsch, Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs; and John Marciari, the Nina and Lee Griggs Associate Curator of Early European Art, both of the Yale University Art Gallery.

Exhibition - Master Drawings presents examples of nearly every artistic movement and drawing technique used by European artists from the Renaissance up to the beginning of the modern era. Not only finished sheets, but also drawings from various stages of the creative process and for a wide variety of purposes—studies for paintings, and works preparatory for prints, stained glass, tapestries, and embroideries—are represented.

The exhibition, which is organized chronologically, opens with a Lion by a Venetian artist of the late fifteenth century. It is an early example of the late-medieval drawing-book tradition in which models were derived from previous works of art rather than from the direct study of nature.

In the sixteenth century, a new interest in the process of creating a work of art developed, as artists based their drawings on nature rather than following established imagery. In particular, artists in Italy began to develop the practice of producing a sequence of preparatory studies for a painting, starting with compositional and figure studies, progressing to a modello (a small version of the finished work), and finally a full-size cartoon. Polidoro da Caravaggio’s Study of a Seated Old Man (ca. 1520)—executed in preparation for a painted frieze at the Palazzo Baldassini—is an example of the figure studies in red chalk that were produced by the school of Raphael. This standard process for preparing a finished work was widespread through the seventeenth century as well, and similarly conceived figure studies by Domenico Zampieri (called Domenichino), Simon Vouet, and others are also featured in the exhibition.

The Mannerist style that arose throughout Europe in the mid-sixteenth century, characterized by a stylized view of the natural world, is represented in the elongated figures used in the Old Testament Prophet (ca. 1550) by Francesco Salviati, Jan Harmensz. Muller’s Neptune (ca. 1589), and Bartholmaeus Spranger’s Venus and Mercury (1600).

This period also saw the development of drawings created as preparation for prints or for stained glass, tapestries, and embroideries. Maerten van Heemskerck’s Mars and the Choleric Temperament (1565) was meant to be copied—and was, line for line—and made into a print by a professional engraver, whereas Jacques Bellange’s Holy Family with Saints (1611–12) is preparatory for his own etching. Designs for stained glass include Bernard van Orley’s The Resurrection of Christ (ca. 1525–30), for an ecclesiastical setting, and Jörg Breu the Elder’s Circe Changing the Men of Ulysses into Animals (ca. 1525–35), most likely for a scholar’s study. Likewise, The Last Supper (1589), by Diego López de Escuriaz, was the cartoon for one of the richly embroidered vestments produced for the Escorial.

Seventeenth-century works such as Jacques de Gheyn’s informal sketch of a Youth Seated at a Table (ca. 1604) demonstrate the rediscovery of naturalism at the time, while Giovanni Battista Caracciolo’s Compositional Study (ca. 1616–20) shows the drama associated with Baroque style. Other highlights from this period include Claude Lorrain’s idyllic Pastoral Landscape (1639) and Jacob Jordaens’s study of a complacent Goat (ca. 1657). The experimentation with caricature that was also common in the seventeenth century is demonstrated by Guercino’s Caricature of a Man in a Large Hat (ca. 1630–40).

Exhibition highlights from the eighteenth century include an informal sketch of Two Recruits (ca. 1715), by Jean-Antoine Watteau, and a finished drawing of A Farmyard Scene (ca. 1740), by François Boucher, which reflects this artist’s affinity for Dutch landscape and genre scenes of the seventeenth century. Extraordinary sheets from the early nineteenth century include one of Domenico Tiepolo’s Punchinello drawings (1800), Bartolomeo Pinelli’s neoclassical Achilles Swears an Oath to Avenge the Dead Patroclus, Killed by Hector (1808), in which Patroclus’s pose, reminiscent of the dead Christ, melds Christian and classical associations, and a study by Théodore Gericault for his Raft of the Medusa (1819).

Later in the exhibition, a watercolor by Théodore Rousseau, The Stone Bridge (ca. 1830), reveals the immediacy and spontaneity that characterize the plein-air sketch, which would become the benchmark of Impressionism. The exhibition closes with a charming early work by Edgar Degas, Seated Young Girl (ca. 1858–59), and a masterful view of Nôtre Dame seen from the Quai de la Tournelle by Johan Barthold Jongkind (1863).