The Metropolitan Museum owns approximately fifteen thousand drawings and 1.5 million prints. The Department of Drawings and Prints focuses almost exclusively on works of graphic art produced after the Middle Ages in Western Europe and in North America. The collection of drawings is known particularly for its works by Italian and French artists of the fifteenth through the nineteenth century. One corollary of its impressive scope is that artists whose paintings are extremely rare—such as Michelangelo, Pontormo, and Altdorfer—are represented at the Metropolitan by splendid sheets that demonstrate their fluency with chalk, ink, and wash. The collection of northern Gothic and Renaissance prints is one of the finest in the world, and eighteenth-century Italian and nineteenth-century French prints are richly represented. Also in the department's care are more than twelve thousand illustrated books and a comprehensive collection of designs for Renaissance and Baroque architecture and the decorative arts.

Highlights from the Department of Drawings and Prints are presented online, organized first by object type—such as drawing, print, or book—and, within types, chronologically.

More about the Department and Its Collection

In 1880 Cornelius Vanderbilt, a Museum trustee, presented to the Metropolitan 670 drawings by or attributed to European Old Masters. In its early decades, the collection of drawings grew slowly through purchase, gift, and bequest. Among the notable acquisitions of this period were major drawings by Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Rembrandt. In 1935, the Museum purchased an album of fifty sheets by Goya; two years later, more than one hundred works, mostly by Venetian artists of the eighteenth century, were acquired from the marquis de Biron. All the while, the collection was overseen and administered by curators in the Department of Paintings. It was not until 1960 that the Department of Drawings was established as a separate curatorial area of the Museum, with Jacob Bean as its first curator. Over the next thirty years, the department's holdings nearly doubled in size.

The Department of Prints was established in 1916 and, under the guidance of its first curator, William M. Ivins Jr., developed rapidly into one of the world's most encyclopedic repositories of printed images. Ivins attracted remarkable gifts and bequests to the Museum: Dürer prints from Junius Spencer Morgan; Gothic woodcuts and late Rembrandt etchings from Felix M. Warburg and his family; and Rembrandt, van Dyck, Degas, and Cassatt prints from the H. O. Havemeyer collection. The collection continued to expand under the leadership of later curators: A. Hyatt Mayor, John McKendry, and Colta Ives. It now extends into the contemporary arena, with works by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and others.

The Department of Drawings and Prints was created in October 1993, under the chairmanship of George Goldner, uniting the greater part of the Museum's varied and extensive collections of graphic art. The department maintains a rotating installation of its holdings in the Robert Wood Johnson Jr. Gallery, which it shares with the Department of Photographs. Its study rooms are open to the public by appointment (see Educational Resources).

The department is also responsible for mounting special exhibitions based on its own and other public and private collections.

In addition to the highlights presented here, some departments have included works on paper among their highlights; see, for instance, The Libraries, The Robert Lehman Collection, Modern Art, Asian Art, Medieval Art, The Cloisters, or Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.