Drawings and Prints: Selections from the Permanent Collection

This exhibition presents a rich range of works on paper dating from the late fifteenth century to the present day. French seventeenth-century drawings and prints include recent acquisitions by Martin Fréminet (1567–1619), Claude Vignon (1593–1670), Pierre Brebiette (ca.1598–1642), Nicolas Mignard (1606–1668), and Antoine Coypel (1661–1722).

British drawings include a recently acquired monochrome by William Blake (1757–1827) shown with works by Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) and George Romney (1734–1802).

Drawings by Italian and Netherlandish artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries treat a host of capricious hybrid animals and monsters.

We pay tribute to the season with a selection of early twentieth-century illustrations for books, magazines, and textiles centered on the theme of snow, and celebrate Valentine's Day with drawings and prints concerned with the theme of the kiss. Among the latter are prints and drawings designed or made by Michelangelo Buonarotti (1475–1564), Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617), Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770), Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), and Edvard Munch (1863–1944). The display is accompanied by historic European and American valentine cards dating to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The exhibition concludes with etchings spanning the career of James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) and a group of modern caricatures by Robbie Conal (born 1944), Patrick Oliphant (born 1935), and David Levine (1926–2009) acquired in conjunction with the exhibition Infinite Jest: Caricature and Satire from Leonardo to Levine (on view through March 4).