Seven Centuries of History Through One Collection of Drawings

Assembled over fifty years, this collection includes a wide variety of media, from black and red chalk, graphite, conté crayon, wash, and pastels to charcoal, watercolor, collage, and pen and ink. It focuses on key periods and places—15th to 18th century Italy; 17th to 20th century France; 17th century Holland; and 20th and 21st century America. Viewers will recognize celebrated masters while gaining an appreciation for lesser-known artists with exceptional skills.

“Richard and Mary’s unerring eye for drawings of extraordinary quality was legendary, and they demonstrated over and over again a level of collecting sophistication rarely matched,” says Kevin Salatino, Anne Vogt Fuller and Marion Titus Searle Chair and Curator of Prints and Drawings, and co-curator of the exhibition.

Highlights include Italian Old Master Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s red-and-white chalk drawing, The Head of a Young Man in Profile to the Left (1749/50), which skillfully depicts a beautiful young man with wild, curly hair, tilting his head quizzically to the side. Tiepolo (1696 – 1770) evokes solidity and dreamy contemplation with expertly placed lines of chalk, expressing the three-dimensionality of the young man’s head and the glint in his eye.

François Boucher’s wonderfully sculptural Study of a Draped Woman Leaning on a Pedestal (1759/61) captures the weight, heft, and flowing folds of fabric of a woman’s voluminous robes and scarf as she casually leans, glancing towards the ground. Boucher (1703–1770) meticulously renders details like the billowing folds of drapery, the shape of her face and outstretched arms, and the fall of her shadow in black and white chalk. The depth of detail lends her a sense of reality so strong she could walk off the page.

Avenue of Pollard Birches and Poplars (1884) shows a different side of Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), who has captured the motion and emotion of a person moving away into the distance in pen and ink lines. A figure, perhaps a woman wearing a light shawl, strides down the sun-dappled path of a tree-lined avenue. The wonderfully textural trees, their branches reaching towards the sky, merge into a canopy, forming a cathedral-like space.

The Grays’ collection of figurative work is wide-ranging, showing figures caught in a variety of poses, in action and at rest, clothed or nude, and captured in a multitude of styles. Through it, we can see how throughout the ages, artists have skillfully captured both the human body and the human condition.