As former teachers of Renaisssance literature, we found ourselves drawn to the prints and drawings of the period. This interest (tending at times to obsession), prompted our acquisition over the past ten years of a number of old master drawings, including works by Netherlandish artists like Bernaert van Orley, Maarten de Vos, Jan Baptiste de Wael, Abraham Bloemaert, Peter Paul Rubens, Philipp Sadeler, and Nicolaes Maes; we have also found works by Italian artists like Raphael, Parmigianino, Marcantonio Raimondi, Giulio Romano, Perino del Vaga, Andrea Schiavone, Veronese, Federico Zuccaro, Luca Cambiaso, Alessandro Casolani, Matteo Rosselli, Annibale Carracci, Domenichino, and Simone Cantarini, Francesco Albani, Guercino, Pier Francesco Mola, Francesco Vanni, Odoardo Fialetti, Ercole Bazzicaluva, Baldassare Franceschini, Giovanni Battista Vanni, Antonio Busca, Giovanni Lanfranco, Giuseppe Maria Cresspi; also in our collection are a growing number of works by German artists like Virgil Solis, Hans von Aachen, and Johann Heinrich Roos and French artists like Charles de la Fosse, Etienne Parrocel "Le Romain," François Boucher, Jean-François de Neufforge, and Mouricault. Some of these works appear to be finished drawings, others attempts to conceptualize an artistic problem to be solved, still others models for members of the master's workshop to execute in whole or in part under the master's supervision, and many are drawings of paintings, sculptures, etchings or engravings by their contemporaries of they works wished to study or use in their own works (including works after Michelangelo, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Palma Il Giovane, Agostino Carracci, Hendrik Goltzius, Rembrandt, among others). In addition to artists to whom we can authorship or attribute works, we have a number of works to which we can more or less confiently attribute only memebrship in a regional or national school, of which we have a number of examples of the Venetian (16th century), Genoese (17th century), and Bolognese Schools (17th century). Some of these drawings are stunningly beautiful finished works, some are quick sketches, and some are useful for studying how earlier collectors assembled their collections. We have found the study of these possibilities instructive towards our considerations of the art and practise of drawing and their relationship to both the paintings and the prints of the era. Old master prints long preceded old master drawings as objects of desire, and our collection of them goes back over 35 years (at least 5 years before we even dreamed of starting a gallery). Albrecht Durer's prints were our first love and it has been an enduring one; the works of early and mid 16th-century Italy, especially on mythoological and religious subjects, began next; the works of the later 16th-century Netherlandish Mannerists, particularly those working with designs by Maerten van Heemskerck, Maarten de Vos, and Hendrik Goltzius (including Goltzius himself), are a more recent love, and we are just beginning to study the works of the eatly-mid 17th century Dutch artists.

19th-century works include Theophile Chauvel (one of the Barbizon group), Heloise Suzanne Colin and Marianne Rohden, both wives and mothers of artists in addition to being well-known artists themselves, Adrian Ludwig Richter (one of whose watercolors sold at auction recently for Please call or email for current pricing information 220), Wilhelm Richter, Felix O. C. Darley (Winslow Homer's model for shaping an artistic career), Otto Greiner, and others. We are also featuring works by Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists like Matisse's friend Henri-Edmund Cross, Maximilien Luce, Claude Monet's protégé André Barbier, Albert Besnard, Nataliya Goncharova (a beautiful and early abstract composition done in Russia c. 1913; one of her paintings sold at Sotheby's London in 1996 for Please call or email for current pricing information),André Derain, the sculptor Reuben Nakian, Rudolf Schlichter, the German Expressionist master (and friend of George Grosz, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya), Marcel Vertes, Isabel Bishop, Aaron Bohrod, outsider-artist Simon Sparrow, and many others. We are also presenting a large group of drawings ranging from the late 15th century to the 19th by that famous artist, "Anonymous" (his/her name is legion!). Our new acquisitions complement the drawings we already had by such modern and contemporary artists as Pierre Alechinsky, his fellow COBRA artist Lucebert, Joan Gardy Artigas, Jim Bird, Claude Garache, John Himmelfarb, Manel Lledos, Jean Tingueley, and Gerard Titus-Carmel, works by all of whom are also in the show. For those of you who saw our last old master drawing show in 2001, we have added 67 new drawings since then; for those of you who missed it, many treats await!

Thinking and looking at our newly expanded drawing inventory, we began thinking about the variety of our drawings and the various purposes for which they were made. In this show we want not merely to show some extraordinarily beautiful drawings but also to invite viewers to consider some of the many kinds of drawings, the multiplicity of uses of drawings, and the varying degrees of artistry of drawings, ranging from masters to amateurs. Because, particularly in the case of earlier artists, drawings were sometimes intended to be for the use of the artist and his assistants, remaining as valued property of the workshop for years, they are not always clearly identified on the sheet and attribution becomes a matter of interpretation. For one example, see the page on Pier Francesco Mola; for another, we offer the commentary below from Diane De Grazia, Correggio and His Legacy: Sixteenth-Century Emilian Drawings (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1984): "The Brussels drawing is catalogued as a Zuccaro, but Anthony Blunt has suggested that it is the work of Francesco Vanni. However the application of red and black chalk is typical of Federico, and an attribution to him can be made with some security, Although the facial features of the more finished figures reflect those of Corregio, several of the lightly sketched angels in the background betray Federico's hand." As the history of the attribution of Rembrandt's paintings over the past forty years by a select committee trying to establish a definitive canon of his works, in which his numbers first sunk from a total of about 700 down to nearly 300, and have since risen to about 500 suggests, even experts can disagree and often the attributions of old master paintings and drawings may change from decade to decade even within the same museum based upon both the current state of knowledge about both artist and period and upon the changing knowledge of the expert doing the attributing.