Raphael, Rembrandt, Ruscha, Michelangelo, and Matisse were among the more than one hundred artists of the fifteenth to twentieth century represented in Master Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Over 120 extraordinary drawings from this superb collection of over two thousand European and American sheets were on view. The selection encompassed all drawing and watercolor media, including ink, chalk, charcoal, crayon, and graphite.
Among the earliest works were a rare compositional sketch by the fifteenth-century Florentine master Fra Filippo Lippi, an exquisite red-chalk figure study by Michelangelo, and sheets by Annibale Carracci, Domenichino, Pietro da Cortona, and both Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo. Jean-Honoré Fragonard's Invocation to Love and The Guilty and Repentant Daughter by Jean-Baptiste Greuze were exhibited alongside two works each by Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt van Rijn. From the Spanish school were works by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Francisco de Goya, and Pablo Picasso, while the small selection of English drawings included landscapes by John Robert Cozens and Joseph Mallord William Turner, as well as The Garden Court by Edward Burne-Jones.
The Cleveland Museum has exceptional holdings of American drawings, including works by George Bellows, Mary Cassatt, Frederick Church, Winslow Homer, Franz Kline, John Marin, and Charles Sheeler, among others. Artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Ellsworth Kelly, and Ed Ruscha represented late-twentieth-century drawing.
The exhibition at the Morgan Library is made possible by part of a bequest from Lore Heinemann, with additional support from Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro, and from Merrill Lynch Trust Company. Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert C. Meister, Jr., John and Polly M. Timken, and The Jane M. Timken Foundation also provided assistance. The exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Lore Heinemann.
Organized and circulated by the Cleveland Museum of Art. National City is the national sponsor of the exhibition.
Giovanni Battista (Giambattista) Piazzetta (Italian, 1682–1754)
A Young Woman Buying a Pink from a Young Man, ca. 1740
Black crayon (wetted and rubbed), heightened with white chalk, on blue laid paper (faded to green-gray)
The Cleveland Museum of Art, Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund 1938.387
