Recent Acquisitions II: Prints, Drawings, and Photographs before 1900

Each year many outstanding works on paper enter the Museum's collection through gift and purchase. This exhibition presents works of art dating from the 15th through the 19th century that have entered the Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs since 1980. The earliest engravings on view include Madonna with the Pear, 1511, by Albrecht Dürer, and The Dance of the Magdalene, 1519, by Lucas van Leyden. The selection of drawings is particularly rich in Italian, French, and English works of the 18th century. Among them are The Shepherd with His Flock, 1732, one of two illustrations for the fables of La Fontaine by Jean Baptiste Oudry acquired by the department; The Roman Matrons Appealing to the Family of Coriolanus, 1792, by Louis Gauffier, which augments the Museum's lively representation of artists active in Rome in the 18th century; and Mad Girl, 1786, by Sir Thomas Lawrence, an intensely romantic vision of a young and beautiful woman gone mad acquired for the Ars Medica collection. The holdings of 19th-century British photography have been strengthened by the acquisition of a portrait of Mrs. Herbert Duckworth by Julia Margaret Cameron, and an album of 40 platinum prints by Peter Henry Emerson entitled Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads, 1886. Five drawings from the Cézanne sketchbooks recently given to the Museum by Walter H. Annenberg will also be on view.