Chicago, IL - This exhibition, organized by the Yale University Art Gallery and traveling to the Smart Museum of Art, provides a compelling survey of European draftsmanship, with masterworks by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Edgar Degas, Guercino, Jacob Jordaens, and Jean-Antoine Watteau, among many others. The selections come from the Yale University Art Gallery’s substantial collection of European drawings and include examples of nearly every artistic movement and drawing technique used by European artists from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century. On exhibition October 4, 2007 – January 6, 2008.

EXHIBITION OVERVIEW & HIGHLIGHTS

Drawing is an enduring practice in the history of European art, and Master Drawings provides examples of drawings from nearly every artistic movement or style from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century. Selected from the Yale University Art 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.

Extraordinary sheets from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries include one of Giovanni 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 Géricault for his Raft of the Medusa (1819).

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

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