I'm John Marciari, the Charles W. Engelhard Curator of Drawings and head of the Department of Drawings and Prints.

Mantegna's Three Studies of a Saint is one of the treasures, not only of the Thaw Collection, but of the Morgan's Italian Drawing Collection as a whole. Drawn in the 1450s, this sheet is perhaps not for a series of saints, but rather is a series of studies, sketches, for a single figure of St. Andrew or St. Philip. Either of those saints could be shown with a book and a cross, or only a book or a cross.

Mantegna has tried alternate solutions for the figure, turning him to the left or right, modifying the way the drapery falls across his legs, experimenting with the way he holds his attributes, and simultaneously adapting a range of details, all while giving the figure a monumental, sculptural sense of volume. The drawing is a marvelous example of an artist thinking with his hand, projecting his imagination directly onto the page. In the later 15th century, sketching like this would become the defining feature of Italian Renaissance draftsmanship, but this is a notably early example, and a rare survival from one of the most important artists of the period.

One important phenomenon associated with Renaissance draftsmanship is the proliferation of drawings made as finished works, not as sketchbook studies nor as preparatory designs, but rather as complete, precious objects to be given or sold to an emerging class of collectors and connoisseurs. Albrecht Altdorfer's Two Lovers by a Fountain in a Landscape is an example par excellence. This rich scene of seduction is drawn with pen and ink and opaque white watercolor on paper tinted with a colored ground. A technique that in Italy stretched back to the early 15th century, but which found new life in German art in the first decades of the 16th century, especially for highly finished drawings like this one and another by [inaudible 00:00:44] seen nearby.

Despite the high degree of finish, however, Altdorfer has retained a sense of spontaneity in the drawing, for example, in the looping black lines that define the foliage of the trees in the top half of the sheet. Those large scale trees are also a trademark of sorts for the artist. Altdorfer was one of the leaders of the so-called Danube School, a group of artists revolutionary in their depiction of landscape scenery. It is typical of that movement that Altdorfer has here lavished as much attention on the trees and craggy rocks of the setting as on the figures.

Rembrandt, The Bulwark De Rose and the Windmill De Smeerpot

This is one of the finest landscape studies by Rembrandt. Particularly mesmerizing is his phenomenal depiction of the light reflections on the buildings and trees. Rembrandt knew exactly where to place his brush to create shadows with board washes, and where to keep the paper blank to suggest sunlight.

The old-fashioned mill known, as the Grease Pot, was used to grind rye and wheat, and was advantageously placed high on top of the Bulwark. Its body could be turned to face the wind by using the wooden struts.

In the background, two small figures provide a sense of scale to the different levels of space so brilliantly represented in the composition. The prominent letter F in the bottom left corner is the collector's mark of Nicolaes Flinck, son of Rembrandt's pupil Govert Flinck. Nicolaes inherited his collection of 500 drawings from his father.

The drawing was acquired from Nicolaes' Estate in the early 18th century by the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth, where it remained until 1987.

This is Ilona van Tuinen, Annette and Oscar de la Renta Assistant Curator of Drawings and Prints. This is the exhibition Drawn to Greatness: Master Drawings from the Thaw Collection.

Rubens was the greatest and most prolific Flemish artists of the 17th century. He created this drawing during the busiest time of his career when he and his workshop were involved in an enormous number of prestigious commissions for large altarpieces, such as this Descent from the Cross commissioned by the Order of the Capuchins. Most of Rubens' compositions originated on the paper, and this is a particularly magnificent example of the artist thinking with his pen.

It is a real working drawing in which Rubens worked out different ideas with bold overlapping pen strokes. He was not concerned with details of costume or background but with the basic arrangements of the figures and the distribution of light that would determine the core of the composition. After recording this initial idea, he made another cleaner drawing to solidify the composition. Rubens' thoughts kept evolving for neither painting, based on these drawings, replicates the composition directly except for the moving figure of the dead Christ with his head fallen to one side.

In the last years of his life, Domenico Tiepolo produced a masterful series of 104 drawings that he entitled The Divertimento Per Li Regazzi, (Entertainment for Children).

This was a somewhat falsely naive title, for the series is a mock epic of the life and times of Punchinello, the commedia dell'arte figure, and it is replete with artistic quotations, knowing jokes, and a lightly sarcastic commentary on Venetian life. In Punchinello's Last Illness, for example, Punchinello lies in bed, tended to by foolish doctors who have little chance of helping him. Some of the bystanders grieve, but others seem to console the doctors more than the dying man himself. A prominent chamber pot likewise undermines the gravity of the moment. As in all drawings from the series Tiepolo's multiple layers of rich, fluid wash elaborate the scene and set off bright pools of light.

There are two drawings from the Punchinello series in the Thaw Collection, which contains in total 18 sheets by Gion. Battista and Domenico Tiepolo. The prone figure of the dying Punchinello with his prominent belly beneath the bedsheet echoes both Gion. Battista's own Drunken Punchinello and his caricature of a sleeping man, which are likewise included in the exhibition.

Some of the most typical products of eighteenth-century Venetian artists were the vedute, views of famous buildings and urban prospects, especially of Venice itself, a city whose appearance was unlike any other. Paintings and drawings by Canaletto and Guardi seem to define our image of Venice even today, especially their views of the Grand Canal or across the lagoon, timeless prospects that are largely unchanged since the 18th century. This drawing by Guardi presents, however, not a general view of the city, but rather a specific event. The moment when on April 15th, 1784, Count Francesco Zambeccari launched a hot air balloon over the Venetian Lagoon, the first balloon flight to be witnessed in Italy. This was only a few months after the Montgolfier Brothers first manned flight in Paris, but the craze for air travel had spread quickly across Europe.

Guardi depicts the scene from the Punta della Dogana, contrasting the heavy framing portico of the customs house with the balloon's weightless ascent. The crowd of spectators, the gondolas surrounding the launch platform, and even the domed churches of San Giorgio Maggiore and Le Zitelle in the distance are all rendered in Guardi's remarkable free shorthand of quivering lines and deft touches of wash.

Antoine Watteau's Young Woman Wearing a Chemise done in 1718 is a drawing in three crayons or three chalks that captures the informality and eroticism of a young female model posed on a chaise longue or sofa. This was one of several drawings that Watteau made with friends of his in an informal setting where they hired a studio and a model for the purposes of drawing.

The young woman who receives our gaze in Jean-Honoré Fragonard's Neapolitan Girl, done in 1774, was likely the wife of a fisherman, but dressed up in very elaborate costumes to celebrate the feast of San Gennaro, which took place in early May in Naples. Fragonard was traveling with his patron, Bergeret de Grancourt and the two of them spent almost a year in many cities in Italy and Europe. This is one of Fragonard's most arresting and modern drawings. The young woman is presented with no anecdote, no frivolity, but with a dignity, a humanity, a strength that is quite remarkable for its time.

This lively compositional drawing with many figures, done by Jean-Baptiste Greuze when he was studying in Rome in 1756, shows The Game of Morra. It's a betting game in which two contestants display a certain number of fingers from their right hand while guessing out loud the total number of fingers that will be presented by both players. It's an early variant of rock, paper, scissors, but a much more violent one.

This nocturnal scene by Caspar David Friedrich is a quintessential romantic landscape drawing. The effect of moonlight was embraced by romantic artists who reveled in the drama and atmosphere of mystery found in evening scenes. Here the light of the moon is reflected in the water and produces golden glints on the tree trunk, fence, and statue of the Virgin Mary at center. Friedrich believed that every truthful work of art must express a definite feeling, must move the spectator either to joy or to sadness, to melancholy or to lightheartedness. Thus, the aim of drawings such as this sheet was to evoke an emotional response rather than convey an explicit narrative. For the deeply religious Friedrich, being stirred while contemplating nature was to be moved by the wonders of divine creation.

To heighten the effect of the moonlight, Friedrich cut a hole in the paper and pasted the circular form of the moon over it so that the thin circle of paper would glow softly with flickering illumination when a candle was placed behind it. He also recommended that the sheet be shown while music was being played. Such an experience would engage the sense of hearing as well as sight and reflects Friedrich's ambition to arouse the viewer's emotions.

Jennifer Tonkovich, the Eugene and Clare Thaw Curator of Drawings and Prints, the Morgan Library and Museum, Drawn to Greatness: Master Drawings from the Thaw Collection.

This study of a massive oak with a cluster of flowering beech trees to the left set a record price for a drawing by the artist when Gene Thaw purchased it at auction in 2000. It is one of the finest drawings by Samuel Palmer from the most innovative period of his career. In 1824, Palmer met the great poet and seer William Blake and was deeply inspired by his example. Leaving London, Palmer settled in the village of Shoreham in Kent and spent the next 10 years making landscape drawings that are renowned for their visionary qualities.

This boldly drawn sheet with its shimmering swirls of graphite and richly impastoed touches of orange and yellow paint on the horizon was one of three commissioned by Palmer's father-in-law and patron, John Linnell. Palmer executed them in Lullingstone Park, a park venerated for its ancient oaks and old-growth forest.

Impressed by Palmer's drawings, Linnell tried to convince the artist that he could earn 1000 pounds a year making drawings of the landscape, but despite Palmer's straightened financial circumstances, he was stalwart against wasting his God-given talent churning out works. As he wrote to a friend, "I will not sell away His gift of art for money. No, not for fame neither." Sheets such as this, where drawing becomes nearly a devotional act for Palmer as he evokes the beauty and glory of creation, are why we think of the artist's Shoreham works as the pinnacle of his career and why he's celebrated as a visionary.

For an artist like J.M.W Turner, fascinated with nature in its most sublime and terrible aspects, a trip to the Alps was practically a necessity, and Turner returned off into Switzerland. He spent every summer there between 1840 and 1845, and in 1842, he climbed the pass above St. Gotthard and witnessed the Ticino River in its spring torrent when melting snow swelled the river. He made a sketch of the scene, and when he showed that sketch to the critic, John Ruskin, later that year, Ruskin commissioned a finished watercolor, the work now in the Thaw collection.

Turner has greatly exaggerated the topography of the scene, and when Ruskin visited the site himself in 1845, he noted "that the mountains, compared with Turner's colossal conception, look pygmy and poor." Yet, as Ruskin wrote a decade later in his modern painters, "The aim of the great inventive landscape painter must be to give the far higher and deeper truth of a mental vision rather than that of the physical facts." Turner's technique is as extraordinary as his vision, delineating the mountains with layers of watercolor, scraping away layers of paint and paper, and then adding further layers of color and wash as he conveys the light, mist and rushing water of the mountain pass.

At the age of 48 and deafened by a serious illness, Goya began to produce hundreds of drawings, executed in series and often accompanied by a caption. He organized these drawings thematically into albums. In the Thaw Collection and on view nearby are works from Goya's early Madrid Album, and the provocative Witches and Old Women Album.

This sheet is from the Black Border Album, containing drawings executed by Goya when he was in his seventies. The drawings are characterized by their bold execution, minimal background, and a thick border in black ink.

This sheet has the immediacy of a candid snapshot. Simple flicks of his brush reveal telling details of body language and expression that are acutely observed. Here, a solitary woman in a barren landscape gathers her cloak around her, arms concealed beneath it, close to the body in a protective, introspective position.

Her face is angled down, her brow shadowed by fabric, her mouth opened not in speech but naturally in thought. She's unaware of us or her surroundings. Notice the few strokes made with the tip of the brush dipped in varying strengths of ink wash that define her nose and open mouth.

That Goya could convincingly depict the thought process, the struggle to accept circumstances, relinquish control, and have faith in providence, in the form of a single figure on a virtually spare page, reveals his genius.

For his epic canvas, The Raft of the Medusa, Géricault made a vast number of drawings. That he would experiment so extensively is unsurprising given the vast scale of the painting, over 16 by 23 feet, and its complex and controversial subject. The artist chose to depict the fate of survivors of the wreck of a French frigate off the coast of Africa, an episode which contained elements of nepotism, incompetence, and government ineptitude, and caused a scandal in Paris.

But how to depict this catastrophe? What moment in the dramatic tale would represent the enormity of the disaster? As the novelist Julian Barnes lamented, "We start with the masterpiece and work backwards through the discarded ideas and near misses, but for Géricault, the discarded ideas began as excitements, and he saw only at the very end what we take for granted at the beginning."

Géricault could not foresee the composition. His explorations were both to resolve the painting, but also to fully explore each component part, sometimes in preparation for a figure and other times to gain a deeper understanding of the subject.

It is clear in sheets such as this head study that Géricault reveled in this research phase of the project, imagining and envisioning the experience on the raft, a real-life disaster that spoke to his liberal political views. While this study serves to capture the model, it is also a virtuoso performance of great sensuality, depicting the play of light over flesh and bone.

Daumier gained fame for his brilliant and lively lithographic illustrations and political cartoons in popular periodicals in newspapers. His approach was intelligent and humorous, and like the work of most satirists, characterized by a flair for keenly observed gestures and mannerisms.

Of the many subjects he had an affinity for, perhaps the most appealing is his depictions of members of the legal profession; a subject that continues to fascinate us today. We find drawings of lawyers preparing their cases and engaged in dramatic courtroom flourishes as they present their arguments.

Here, at a table in a courtroom, a rotund lawyer leans back to share a conspiratorial aside with his gaunt colleague, who absorbs the news with a vacant-eyed stare.

Daumier was a great skeptic of the government and critic of the justice system in France under Napoleon III, so it's not surprising that he would poke fun at the habits and postures of these representatives of the law.

By the 1860s, the art market in Paris offered many opportunities for exhibiting and selling highly finished pictorial drawings, and Daumier's reputation was at its height.

For this richly worked sheet, Daumier first drew the figures lightly in black chalk, then used subtle watercolor washes. Notice the delicate strokes of rose and yellow in the faces before adding a final layer of pastel and delineating the features with thin, velvety strokes of chalk.

Born in a small Norman village and steeped in the realities of farm life. Millet became the quintessential painter of rural labor, and many can call to mine the image of his gleaners or sower at work in the wheat fields in France. This hushed scene of an exhausted couple loading heavy sacks of newly harvested potatoes onto a cart as dusk falls was made when the struggling Millet was living with his family in the village of Barbizon near the forest of Fontainebleau. Rather than produce grand subjects from ancient history or lush fantasies of Turkish baths as his contemporaries were doing, Millet opted to depict laborers going about the arduous tasks of rural life at a time of increasing industrialization when many were flocking to cities for employment.

Encouraged by his dealer to produce finished drawings for sale, Millet began working on large-scale narrative scenes of agricultural life. When a group of these drawings were sold after the artist's death, they were referred to collectively as The Epic of the Fields. Millet visually chronicled this world more than 30 years before Emile Zola published Germinal, his masterful naturalist tale of a coal mining village set in the 1860s. The use of black chalk over the entire surface of the sheet and the strong contours and humble subjects of Millet's monumental drawings would prove hugely influential on artists from Van Gogh to Seurat.

Degas interest in ballet dancers was really an interest in the female body. Not in an idealized context, but in the efforts and contortions of it before, during, and after the dance. This large sheet is one of a group of informal appraisals of a teenage dancer or opera rat, as they were known, named Marie von Goethem. The result of this campaign of study was the creation of the only sculpture Degas exhibited publicly, his little dancer, age 14. A figure in colored wax, three feet tall, and augmented with real hair, silk ribbon, and a linen bodice and muslin skirt, shown at the 1881 impressionist exhibition. She was reviled by the public, called ugly and vicious, in the ensuing scandal that accompanied its display. In preparation for working on the three-dimensional sculpture, Degas studied her body, both clothed in her practice skirt and naked, often recording her pose from multiple angles.

Here she's shown at rest with her legs turned out and her hands clasped behind her back. Degas did not shy away from trying to delineate the awkward areas, such as her jutting shoulder blade in the figure at left or the foreshortening of her arm in the center study, as her elbow juts out at an odd angle. Grasping the disposition of the female body in poses taken at dance rehearsals or performances, or at the bath, occupied Degas thoughts during the 1880s. In this drawing, we see the artist addressing the challenges of depicting the young working class dancer, a subject frankly depicted and poignant in its combination of strength and vulnerability.

By 2003, the Thaw Collection contained two drawings by Vincent van Gogh, and a letter from Van Gogh to Paul Gauguin with a drawing of the artist's Bedroom at Arles. Then, a remarkable opportunity emerged. Jean Thaw was able to acquire a batch of 21 letters written by Van Gogh to his young protege Emile Bernard. The whereabouts of this cache of correspondence had been unknown, and the acquisition was a thrilling highlight of Thaw's career as a collector.

The letters chronicle the Dutch artist's life from the moment he left Paris in 1887 and arrived in Arles and continue after his falling out with Gauguin and institutionalization at Saint-Rémy in 1889. Only months after the last letter was written, Van Gogh committed suicide at the age of 37.

Devoted to observations about art and life as an artist, the letters reveal much about Van Gogh's activity, ambitions and working method as he painted his best and most iconic works. Nine of the letters are illustrated with drawings that conveyed Van Gogh's paintings and progress to Bernard. In one missive, he muses to his friend, "But when will I do the Starry Sky then, that painting that is always on my mind? Alas, alas, it's just as our excellent pal Cyprien says, in Married Life by Riesemont, 'The most beautiful paintings are those one dreams of while smoking a pipe in one's bed, which one does not make.'"

Hanging nearby, Van Gogh's pen and ink drawing of two cottages captures the first time the Dutch artist glimpsed the Mediterranean Sea on a visit to the town of Saintes-Maries. You can see the water in the distance between the two cottages above the shrubs. It also marks the moment when he began to experiment with different types of pen strokes, patterns, and marks to evoke texture, form, and light in his drawings. In contrast, the style of the drawing depicting workers on a farm executed only two years later with its vibrating short curling strokes of black chalk documents the change in Van Gogh's draftsmanship during the last months of his life.

I am Isabelle Dervaux, Acquavella Curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawings. This is the exhibition Drawn to Greatness: Master Drawings from the Thaw Collection.

This drawing by a Spanish artist Juan Gris is a superb example of Cubism, a movement launched by Braque and Picasso in Paris in 1907. Gris, who had moved from Madrid to Paris in 1906 and who was a close friend of his compatriot Picasso, embraced the style a few years later.

The fragmentation and decomposition of the head in this drawing are typical of the Cubist approach, which rejects conventional use of perspective and modeling in the depiction of the real world. Instead, objects are seen from several angles at the same time.

Here, for instance, one ear is frontal, while the other is in profile. The hat is at once rectangular and circular to evoke its cylindrical shape. The superposition of different planes builds the figure in space, suggesting its volume without recourse to traditional perspective.

This drawing is a study for a painting or more precisely for a detail of a painting that represents a man seated at a table in a cafe. In the painting, the head of the man is the part that presents the most complex fragmentation, which explains that Gris worked it out first in preparatory studies.

In fact, the drawing is particularly interesting because it shows the difficulties Gris encountered in composing the image. In the lower half, you can see many traces of erasures, which reveal the intensive process of trial and error that the artist went through to create the figure.

Gris's Cubism differs from that of Braque and Picasso through a greater emphasis on structure, yet despite the cerebral aspect of his method there is a certain humor in the drawing. The distortions of the face, for instance, have a comical effect, which reminds us that for many years before he was able to sell his paintings, Gris had been earning his living by making caricatures for satirical magazines.

The author of this drawing is Jackson Pollock, who is better known for his drip paintings of the late 1940s, made by dripping and pouring paint onto the canvas to create complex linear abstractions. This drawing was made earlier in his career, during an experimental phase when Pollock was looking for inspiration in a variety of sources. On the one hand, he admired European modernism. Notice the small linear drawings of snakes and birds that recall similar creatures in the whimsical compositions of Paul Klee or Juan Miró, or the image of a bull at the center of the sheet, which may refer to Picasso's bullfights and Minotaurs.

On the other hand, Pollock was fascinated by the art of tribal and primordial societies. He included here references to Native American artifacts and African sculptures. Notice the mask at lower left, for instance. At lower right, the imaginary scripts resemble primitive pictographs. The disparate elements of the composition are unified by the technique, notably, the black ink wash and the accents of red chalk. The loose application of the wash and the spattered ink, which anticipates the drip paintings, recall the automatic techniques of the surrealists, who attempted to draw without conscious control as a means to release the artist's subconscious. The dedication to PG next to the signature refers to Peggy Guggenheim, the well-known collector and dealer, who gave Pollock his first solo exhibition at her gallery in New York in 1943. She provided major support to the young artist by giving him a monthly stipend for several years. She also organized several exhibitions of his work, which were essential in establishing his reputation.