Old museum in Britain displays master drawings
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E-mail Xinhua, May 25, 2013
The Ashmolean Museum, one of the world's oldest public museums, launched an exhibition of master drawings to mark its founding in 1683.
The exhibition will run from Saturday to August 18, bringing together 70 pieces of works on paper, including those from Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Raphael, Durer, Rubens, Titian, Rembrandt and Turner, among others.
"Looking closely at drawings is an intimate experience," said Christopher Brown, director of the museum. "We can see how the artist's hand, eyes and imagination are all engaged in capturing an idea or representing a motif in graphic marks on paper."
Dr. Jon Whiteley, senior curator of European Art, has been working in the museum for over 30 years. He told Xinhua that the museum began collecting drawings from 1842.
A museum of art and archaeology, it gave up the plan of buying paintings because they were too expensive and hard to collect, and turned to the relatively cheaper drawings.
"When the present Ashmolean opened in 1846, people came not to see sculptures and paintings, but the largest collection of Raphael drawings and the collection of Michelangelo drawings which was at least among the top three," Whiteley said.
As the museum gradually built up its fame in drawing collection, people would give the pieces they had to it so as to have the works "come home".
"Now we have 27,000 drawings here and more are still arriving," said the curator.
The new exhibition started with North Renaissance artists, whose surviving drawings were rare. One of the big names was Albrecht Durer.
"He is the first artist that we know used watercolor drawings," Whiteley said.
The piece, View of the Cembra Valley, was assumed as among a series recording the route Durer took across the Alps. Although faded, the shimmering evening sky added a touch of romantic poetry to the scene. The painter might be sitting on hilltop, looking down and responding to the twilight.
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