European Drawings from the Collection of the Ackland Art Museum

Masters of the Medium highlights seventy-three of the most important Old Master drawings and watercolors in the Museum's collection. Thanks to the interest and efforts of a succession of curators and directors from the early years of the Ackland's foundation to the present day, the Museum has built a significant collection of nearly three hundred European drawings dating from the sixteenth through the early twentieth centuries. However, as noteworthy as the collection is, many of the drawings are little known outside the Museum. A newly published catalogue, European Drawings from the Collection of the Ackland Art Museum, will rectify this by bringing the Museum's fine collection to the attention of scholars around the world.The exhibition Masters of the Medium celebrates the scholarly publication and the decade of research devoted to bringing the project to fruition. Together with Space, Abstraction and Freedom: Twentieth-Century Art from the Collection of Mary and Jim Patton, the European drawings exhibition also heralds the beginning of the campaign for expansion of the Ackland.

While the catalogue organizes the Ackland’s European drawings collection by the nationalities of the artists – Italian, Netherlandish, French, British and German – Masters of the Medium groups the drawings thematically, focusing on the functions the drawings served and the range of subjects they depict. The artists represented in the exhibition made drawings for a variety of reasons, and those reasons influenced the way the drawings look: the degree of finish, the range of colors, the medium employed. A few of the drawings were made for their own sakes. The quirky, luminous Man Walking by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, we believe, was produced by the artist purely for his personal enjoyment. Several others in the collection were created as gifts for patrons, mentors and colleagues. These drawings tend to have the polished appearance of paintings, as does Rosa Bonheur's Sheep in a Landscape, which she dedicated and offered as a gift to a friend.

Most of the drawings in Masters of the Medium functioned as part of their artists' creative processes – they were a means to another end. Artists of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries typically used drawings as vehicles for exploring and developing their ideas for the design of commissioned portraits, landscapes and narrative scenes in other media (paintings, prints and sculptures, etc.). Drawings such as Käthe Kollwitz’s Mother Embracing her Dead Son, a preliminary design for her etching The Battlefield (also in the Ackland’s collection), and Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones' Seated Woman, a study for his painting The Hours, are visual expressions of the artists’ thought processes as they worked out the arrangement of compositions or details of single figures.

Old Master drawings served primarily as a means to a creative end, but artists devoted as much thought to the means as they did to the ends. As the exhibition and the accompanying gallery guide emphasize, artists carefully selected media appropriate for the functions and subjects of their drawings. Red chalk, for example, suitably suggests the sensuous fleshiness of the sculptor Bernini's Truth Revealed by Time in the Ackland’s eighteenth-century French drawing after it. Pen and ink provided Salvator Rosa with the fluidity and flexibility he needed to dash off his first ideas for two of the worshiping figures in his painting Jonah Preaching to the Ninevites.

Masters of the Medium will have served its purpose if viewers come away from the exhibition with a keen appreciation for drawings as original works of art as well as for their capacity to make vividly present the creative minds of master artists from centuries past.

Carolyn H. Wood
Curator of Education

Masters of the Medium: European Drawings from the Collection of the Ackland Art Museum was curated by Ackland staff members Carolyn Allmendinger, educator for university audiences, Carol Gillham, assistant curator for the collections, and Carolyn Wood, curator of education, who were also responsible for the publication of the European drawings catalogue. The exhibition and publication were supported by the William Hayes Ackland Trust.