This work, the companion volume to Italian Drawings of the 15th, 16th, and 17th Centuries, completes the important task of cataloging the Italian drawings held by the Art Institute of Chicago.

This beautiful and important book highlights the collection of European drawings at the Yale University Art Gallery, one of America's premier university museums. From intimate studies to exquisite finished compositions, this selection of works documents the history of European drawing practices beginning with late-medieval model books and progressing to the verge of the modern period. The accompanying text--written by a team of scholars--offers a unique introduction to various critical and technical aspects of the study of master drawings, brought to life through drawings from a range of national schools and in a variety of media. Among the drawings examined in this handsomely produced volume are an animated pen and ink sketch by Giulio Romano, a pastoral landscape by Claude Lorrain, a forceful and humorous caricature by Guercino, a scene from the epic poem Orlando Furioso by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and a delicate portrait by Edgar Degas.

"This is the third volume in an acclaimed series that will publish all of the master drawings at one of America's great museums. It reproduces and documents - with essays by a team of leading scholars - sheets from Italy, France, England, and Spain ranging from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. It features splendid works by some of the greatest draftsmen of all time, among them Michelangelo, Tintoretto, Guercino, Canaletto, Giovanni Battista and Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, Jacques Callot, Claude Lorrain, Francois Boucher, Maurice Quentin de La Tour, Thomas Gainsborough, John Hoppner, Peter Lely and George Romney as well as others by lesser-known and unidentified artists. Each work is exquisitely reproduced in rich duotone and discussed in an individual essay." "The Detroit Institute of Arts acquired its first two drawings in the year of its founding, 1885, both gifts from James E. Scripps, who went on to be one of the great benefactors of the graphic arts division. Among the other leading figures in the history of the drawing collection have been donors John S. Newberry and Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Walker as well as director William R. Valentiner, who in 1934 made a now-legendary buying trip to Europe, returning with sixty-nine master drawings acquired with a budget of $4,000." "Italian, French, English, and Spanish Drawings and Watercolors represents the combined efforts of a team of leading specialists in the field of master drawings. They provide for each of 231 sheets: attribution, date, medium, dimensions, inscriptions and annotations, condition, provenance, exhibition history, and published references."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved