Ranging from preparatory studies and sketches to finished works of art, the nearly twelve thousand drawings in The Morgan Library & Museum's collection span the fourteenth through twenty-first centuries. The primary focus is European drawings executed before 1825, but the Morgan's holdings include a growing number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century works on paper as well as drawings by American artists. In addition to a print collection of British political satires and portraits, about two hundred paintings, sculptures, medieval reliquaries, and ceramics, the Morgan has the largest and most representative collection of Rembrandt etchings in the United States
In 1909 Pierpont Morgan established the core of the Morgan's holdings when he purchased a collection of about fifteen hundred old master drawings from the English artist-collector Charles Fairfax Murray. Its strengths—notably sixteenth- and eighteenth-century Italian drawings and Netherlandish drawings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—remain unsurpassed in the United States. Since the founding of the Morgan as a public institution, the most important factor in the growth of the collection has been the acquisition of individual works and entire collections through gifts and bequests.
Italian drawings comprise nearly three thousand individual sheets as well as drawings in albums and sketchbooks, including works by Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci. French drawings are a major strength, with drawings by Claude, Fragonard, and Watteau. Works by Ingres, Delacroix, Degas, Cézanne, and Matisse have strengthened the Morgan's holdings in works by nineteenth- and twentieth-century draftsmen. British drawings comprise more than one thousand individual sheets as well as albums and sketchbooks. Hogarth, Gainsborough, Blake, Turner, Constable, and Burne-Jones are only a few of the distinguished draftsmen represented in the collection. The Morgan's holdings include more than seven hundred works by Netherlandish, Dutch, and Flemish artists, such as Rembrandt, Goltzius, Rubens, and van Dyck. German drawings in the collection include masterpieces by Dürer and Friedrich. American artists represented include Audubon and Benjamin and Raphael Lamar West.
Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.
Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.
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Drawings & Prints
Francisco Goya
Just Because She Is Asked if Her Mother Is Well She Acts Like a Tigress (Solo porque le pregunta, si esta buena su madre se pone como un tigre). Verso: Trust (Confianza)
Filippino Lippi
Kneeling Saint Mary Magdalene and Standing Christ. Verso: Standing Man Holding a Sword and Kneeling Youth Holding a Staff
Henry Fuseli
Kriemhild at the Wake of Siegfried
Thomas Gainsborough
Lady Walking in a Garden
Claude Lorrain
Landscape, with Shepherd and Flock at the Edge of a Wood
Gabriel Jacques de Saint-Aubin
Momus
Georges Seurat
Nurse with a Child's Carriage. Verso: Woman Standing, Arms Extended
Samuel Palmer
Oak Tree and Beech, Lullingstone Park
Jean-Honoré Fragonard
Portrait of a Neapolitan Woman
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Portrait of Guillaume Guillon Lethière (1760-1832)
John Singer Sargent
Portrait of Paul-César Helleu
Maître de Flore
Procris and Cephalus