Selections from the Department of Drawings and Prints: Journeys

The Department of Drawings and Prints boasts more than one million drawings, prints, and illustrated books made in Europe and the Americas from around 1400 to the present day. Because of their number and sensitivity to light, the works can only be exhibited for a limited period and are usually housed in on-site storage facilities. To highlight the vast range of works on paper, the department organizes four rotations a year in The Robert Wood Johnson, Jr. Gallery. Each installation is the product of a collaboration among curators and consists of up to one hundred objects grouped by artist, technique, style, period, or subject.

This installation features works that respond to journeys made across land and sea, as well as into spiritual and imaginative realms. Highlights include sixteenth-century drawings in which the experience of revelation is expressed through light; a group of prints by the Dutch engraver Hendrick Goudt (1583–1648); seventeenth-century thesis prints from across Europe; early modern manuals and albums about the instruction and exercise of penmanship; drawings modeled on prints and the culture of artistic pedagogy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; recently acquired watercolors by the British watercolorist John Sell Cotman (1782–1842) that offer an overview of his influential career; prints and drawings by the eighteenth-century Irish artist James Barry (1741–1806) that relate to significant murals he painted at London's Society of Arts; a group of red chalk drawings explore that medium's range and potential; "penny-black" postage stamps and medals designed by William Wyon (1795–1851) that explore how the young Queen Victoria's public image was molded and circulated; and eighteenth-century devotional images that combine printed and drawn elements with paint, fabric, and other materials.