Italian, French, English and Spanish Drawings and Watercolors: The Collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts - Hardcover

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.