Old master drawings are a challenge for conservators. Fragile and damaged over time simply by exposure to light, drawings cannot be placed on permanent display, or even frequent display. Every period of exposure to light must be considered, in effect, a time subtracted from the life of the drawing.

Also, drawings, even those by great masters, receive less notice and attention than paintings, and for both reasons are less frequently the subject of mounted exhibitions.

So when collections or parts of collections of master drawings are exhibited, it’s worthy of notice.

The Morgan Library and Museum in New York, which I have written about previously, and mentioned in my recent post on their cuerrent exhibit, The Hours of Catherine of Cleves, is home to a great collection of master drawings.

They have drawn form it, if you’ll excuse the expression, an exhibition focused on a particular place and time. Rome After Raphael displays over 80 drawings, most of them from the Morgan’s own collection, that take Raphael’s work as a watershed moment (not an uncommon thought, see my posts on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of 19th Century), and follow developments in drawing in the 100 years following.

Tough nothing quite compares with seeing master drawings in person (I think drawings suffer even more in reproduction than paintings), the Morgan has provided an extensive selection of drawings from the show. These are zoomable, and the zooming feature is supplemented with a terrific “Full Screen” option that allows you to view them without the constraining frame of many zooming features (look for it at the bottom right of the zooming controls).

There is also an online feature that walks through a discussion of several of the drawings and goes into more detail on some of the artists, their relationship to each other and their place in time.

Raphael was one of history’s greatest draftsmen, and is, of course, represented, along with another, Michelangelo (see my post on Michelangelo’s drawings).

Many well known and lesser known artists working in Rome during that period are also represented by drawings of a variety of subjects — allegorical, architectural and religious, like Parmigianino’s drawing after Michelangelo’s Pieta (above top); and even landscape studies, like Annibale Carracci’s wonderful pen and brown ink sketch of a riverside tree (above, bottom).

Rome After Raphael is on display through May 9, 2010.

In the hands of 16th Century masters like Bronzino, drawings were rarely considered artworks in themselves, but studies in preparation of more finished works like paintings or frescoes. They were a means to an end, a step in the process. Yet, drawings from those times are valued now as highly beautiful works of art in themselves, and rightly so.

Agnolo Bronzino was born Agnolo di Cosimo di Mariano Tori, and known as Il Bronzino for reasons that are unclear but may have had to do with his complexion, or that of his subjects. He had the good fortune to become a pupil of another great Florentine artist, Jacopo Pontormo, who was only nine years older then his pupil. Their styles are similar in may ways; they maintained a collaborative relationship for most of their careers, and attributions of works sometimes flop back and forth.

Bronzino’s drawings show that similarity at times, and a similar level of command of draftsmanship, line and tone; which is to say, very high indeed. (I also see similarities to the chalk drawings of Raphael in his isolated figures.)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has mounted an exhibit, the first ever devoted to Bronzino, The Drawings of Bronzino, that contains 60 drawings drawn from sources in the U.S. and Europe. There is a selection of drawings from the exhibit here.

There is a book accompanying the exhibit, also titled The Drawings of Bronzino. The exhibit runs until April 18. 2010.

One of the best decisions I ever made as an artist after I got out of art school was to return to drawing the figure from life in regular sessions.

Few practices are as challenging or rewarding for an artist as drawing the human form. The great traditions of Western art are founded on it and it is still one of the most fundamental aspects of artistic endeavor.

If you’re not a full time art student, finding a session for drawing from life is somewhat easier in large or medium size cities than in more rural areas, but it can be a bit of a challenge even there unless you know where to look. Often there are classes or workshops offered by art schools, museums and artists’ organizations, but you have to search them out.

It would be nice if there ware a central reference for them, and as it happens, I stumbled across a very good listing of over 500 such sessions across the U.S. and Canada. (If someone knows of similar listings in Europe and elsewhere, let me know and I’ll post the links.)

Figure Drawing Open Studios, Workshops, and Continuing Education Classes is a list assembled as part of the web site supporting The Art Model’s Handbook, a book aimed at those who work as artist’s models (a more demanding practice than most people realize).

Presumably intended as a service to models, they have provided an excellent list of classes and venues, organized by state or province.

I checked on the several classes and workshops in Delaware and Philadelphia that I have attended or am familiar with, including The Delaware College of Art and Design (where I teach an unrelated class), The Delaware Art Museum, The Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Sketch Club and the Plastic Club. The listings for all of them seem accurate and reasonably up to date, so I might assume that their listing for other venues in North America are similarly good.

Though I doubt it’s comprehensive, this is a great place to start if you are looking for a life drawing session.

Some are formal classes, but many are individual sessions or open studios that you can attend when you like, without signing up for a specific number of classes. Some of the latter are instructed, many are open studios where you are on your own to work as you like without instruction.

In most cases you bring your own materials, and the venue provides easels, chairs and sometimes even drawing benches. There is a moderator who administers the sessions and usually determines poses. Sessions can vary in length, but many are about three hours, with breaks for the models at intervals.

The listings give some indication of which sessions are devoted to long poses, short poses, or mixtures of short and long (the most common arrangement). Some offer sessions of clothed or costume models and portrait sessions in addition to more traditional life drawing sessions. (For a side take on non-traditional drawing sessions, see my post on Dr. Sktechy’s Anti-Art School.)

If you haven’t attended life drawing sessions before, you’ll find most of the sessions quite beginner friendly, contact the school or organization and see what classes or sessions they recommend.

As opposed to the more formal classes, most of the open studios and workshops are weekly, come and go as you please, and charge only a model fee for the session, usually about $8 – $10.

Most of the listings offer a link to the venue sponsoring the sessions, where you can find more details and contact information (it’s always wise to make sure dates and times are current).

The image above is by Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, one of the finest academic figure artists, certainly one of my favorites, and is meant to be inspirational, not intimidating.

One of the most important things I learned in my continuing practice of drawing from life was to never be intimidated by comparing my level of drawing ability to someone else’s ability. Nothing will hold you back more. We are all simply at different points on the path, and the more you draw, the further you go.

What are you waiting for?

I’ve mentioned before (also here) that the attribution of works to artists from the past is often an inexact science, perhaps more of an art in itself.

Attributions change, and works once identified with one artist are subsequently assigned to another, or often, to pupils of the artist. Sometimes the reverse happens, and works once assigned to another hand are recognized as coming from that of the master.

The Getty Museum is currently exploring this concept with an exhibit titled Drawings by Rembrandt & His Pupils: Telling the Difference.

In the web site material for the exhibit is an interactive that compares drawings by Rembrandt side by side with similar drawings by his students and contemporaries; many of the latter drawings having once been attributed to Rembrandt.

The Wall Street Journal has an article about the exhibit that also has an interactive. In this case they present the compared sets of drawings without initially identifying the artist, letting you play detective in determining which is by Rembrandt. (It’s hard to predict if this article may disappear behind a pay-wall at some point.)

The interactive on the Getty’s site allows you to zoom in on the images, affording a detailed view of the drawings.

Drawings by Rembrandt & His Pupils: Telling the Difference runs to February 28th at the Getty Center. There is a concurrent exhibit, Drawing Life: The Dutch Visual Tradition, that should provide a rich context for the Rembrandt show.

There is also a virtual exhibit called Rembrandt in Southern California, that features images of 14 Rembrandts on view in five Southern California Museums.

For more background, and lots more Rembrandt drawings, see Rembrandt’s Drawings on Jonathan Janson’s Rembrandt van Rijn: Life and Work, and my posts on that site (formerly called Rembrandt: life, paintings, etchings, drawings and self portraits), and Jonathan Janson.

There is a book published to accompany the exhibit: Drawings by Rembrandt and His Pupils: Telling the Difference; and there is also a nice book of Rembrandt drawings that came out in 2007: Rembrandt Drawings: 116 Masterpieces in Original Color.

This beautiful drawing in pen and brown ink, wash and brown, black and white chalks, Adoration of the Shepherds, by François Boucher, is currently on display at the Morgan Library and Museum in new York.

It is part of an exhibit called Rococo and Revolution: Eighteenth-Century French Drawings, that runs until January 3, 2010.

There is a selection of drawings from the show highlighted on the Morgan’s web site, which are linked to zoomable versions. Though I’m not always a fan of the constraints of zooming images, they still offer the ability to see details normally not available in smaller images on the web. This is also something that is rarely applied to drawings.

Zooming in on this drawing we can see Boucher’s fluid Rembrandt-like pen lines. Look at the way he has used the reddish brown tones and judicious applications of white chalk to give the scene a luminous quality more often seen in paintings than drawings.

I love the wonderfully economic notation of the animals and the wooden structures, bales and baskets at the lower right portion of the drawing.

Since I wrote about illustrator Larry Roibal last year, he has been continuing his wonderful practice of daily sketches of prominent figures.

Roibal draws his newsmakers on newsprint, literally. It’s common for artists to draw on “newsprint”, meaning the cheap pulp paper, similar to that on which newspapers are printed, that is used for quick sketches and throw-away drawings, but Roibal’s “newsprint” drawings take on a whole new meaning.

He sketches his portraits of politicians, world leaders, entertainers, sports figures and other newsworthy individuals directly on sections of newspaper articles about them.

Roibal’s ballpoint pen drawings are defined enough to give a sharp likeness of the individual, but open enough to let the newsprint come through.

Roibal has just assembled a remarkable collage of his drawings from the past year. My excerpt above is just a tiny fraction of the whole. You can also see a tabloid size excerpt here.

Of course, for the larger and more detailed drawings, take a meander back through his blog posts over the course of a fascinating year of news and personalities.

Matteo Pericoli is an Italian architect, illustrator and author. His drawings have appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Travel and Leisure and Conde Nast Traveller.

He is known for his Manhattan Unfurled project, in which he drew two 37 foot (11 meter) long scrolls with detailed skylines of the East and West sides of Manhattan. The drawings took two years and encompassed over 1,500 buildings and 19 bridges.

These were collected into a book, presented as a 24 panel, 22 foot (6.7 meter) long fold-out. You can see a very small scrolling version of them on Pericoli’s web site.

Pericoli also did a 397 foot (121 meter) mural called Skyline of the World for The American Airlines terminal at JFK Airport, depicting an amalgamation of many of the world’s great buildings and skylines.

Pericoli has a new project, also released as a book, The City Out My Window: 63 Views on New York; in which he captures the view, not out of his own window, but out of the windows of notable New York residents, like David Byrne (image above, top), Stephen Colbert, Tom Wolfe, Nora Ephron, Wynton Marsailis, Philip Glass, Annie Leibovitz, Mikail Barishnikov and many others.

Along with his drawings, Pericoli has collected comments from the individuals about their view; many of whom also say that his drawings have caused them to see their familiar view with fresh eyes. There is a pop-up from the link in the title on this page, that shows a few of the drawings and comments.

There is an article and slide show of drawings from the project on the NYT site; and there was a story on Pericoli this morning on the CBS Sunday Morning magazine show.

There is also a selection of other drawings on Pericoli’s web site.

Sandra Allen draws highly detailed and carefully rendered images of individual trees. Her charcoal and pencil drawings are large scale, often 6 feet (1.8meters) in height or more.

Allen received a BFA from UMass Dartmouth School of Art and an MFA from Yale University School of Art; and is represented in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University and the Yale University Art Gallery, among others.

In 2001 she started her series of tree drawings which she likens to “portraits”. They are represented without their foliage, and she revels in their structure as revealed by shadows of the forms overlapping other forms.

Her work is currently on exhibit at the New Britain Museum of American Art until January 24, 2010.

When I first wrote in 2006 about Frank Brangwyn, the superbly accomplished painter, muralist, watercolorist, illustrator and printmaker, there were only a few scattered resources on the web, and very little in the way of available books or other printed material.

Since then, more resources have become available on the web, and I’ve listed some of them below. Though no new books have become available there is a wonderful new portfolio of some of his best graphic work.

Auad Publishing, a small imprint that specializes in beautifully produced books of the work of classic illustrators and comics artists (see my post on Franklin Booth), has created a faithful reproduction of a 1935 portfolio of lithographs, Frank Brangwyn, R. A.: The Way of the Cross.

This is a lovingly produced set of 20 plates, printed in letterpress (rare these days except for high end art reproductions) on 11″x14″ 80lb textured stock, in a deluxe fourfold portfolio.

The beautiful production values are quickly overshadowed by the power of Brangwyn’s drawings; powerful both in the sense of the emotional drama of their depiction of the Stations of the Cross, an in Brangwyn’s masterful drawing style and striking compositions.

In his work as an illustrator, Brangwyn acquired a great sense of design, and his classical training gave him the solid, finely honed draftsmanship that is the foundation of his influential style, but it is his own emotional investment in the subject, and his remarkable mastery of chiaroscuro, that bring the drawings to life.

The portfolio has an essay by Dr. Libby Horner, who is probably the world’s foremost authority on Brangwyn and his work. Dr. Horner created the frankbrangwyn.org web site (which is not heavy on images, but has lots of useful information about the artist, including a list of books he illustrated and links to other Brangwyn resources).

In Brangwyn’s drawings you can see the influence of Rembrandt and other great printmakers, and the drama of his own style that so heavily influenced the great illustrator Dean Cornwell (also here) and many others.

There is a small preview of the Way of the Cross portfolio on the Auad Publishing site, from which I’ve borrowed the images above (click on the image in the page for a pop-up gallery).

The small images here and on the Auad website don’t do the portfolio justice, but those who are already aware of Brangwyn’s accomplishments will want to be aware that the portfolio is limited to 700 numbered copies.

If, like me, you find yourself frequently frustrated with the relatively low resolution images provided by many museums and fine art sites; and tire of the frustrating little zoom windows that they provide for a “close up”, I have a suggestion for a site that you may not have considered.

This site has nice large images of museum quality art that happens to be changing hands. It is the Sotheby’s auction site.

Sotheby’s is a long established auction house through which some of the world’s most expensive (and notorious) art purchases have been transacted. Prior to their sales they post on their site previews of the items to be auctioned, in high enough resolution for potential buyers to take a look, and even bid online if inclined.

For those of us who can’t shell out a few million for the odd masterpiece here and there, the site is still a treasure trove of relatively high resolution images of terrific art.

You can’t pick and choose, of course; what’s up is what happens to be for sale, but I find it rare that I cannot check out an auction of art from the early 20th Century or earlier without encountering several pieces that make the visit worthwhile.

They currently list an auction of American Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture that is due to be auctioned in New York on December 3, 2009. It includes work by Everett Shinn, Jessie Wilcox Smith, Andrew Wyeth, Robert Henri, Childe Hassam, Thomas Hart Benton, Norman Rockwell, Mary Cassatt, Edward Redfield, Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Moran, J.C. Leyendecker, Thomas Eakins, James Bama, Frederic Remington, and N.C. Wyeth, among others.

Click on “View E-Catalogue”, wait a few seconds for the pop-up window to populate with thumbnails, then maximize the window and scroll through the thumbnails to find what you like. Mouse over them to see the name of the piece and artist, and click to view the single piece. Then look for the “Zoom In” button below the image and use the plus sign to enlarge the image as large as it will go. The title block and zoom control can block part of the image, but you can get around that by moving your mouse to scroll.

Exit zoom and you can then use the next and previous buttons to move through the images, or use the navigation to return to the thumbnails.

The images are usually much larger than most encountered on the net, often large enough to see the brushstrokes quite nicely.

From the main pages you can choose “Explore Auctions” and find sales of old masters, 19th Century art, Russian painting, Impressionist and modern art and a variety of other auctions scheduled in locations across the world. There are several pages of auctions listed at any given time.

For any of them, click “Browse New E-Catalog” to get to the large images. There are also downloadable PDF catalogs for many of the auctions, but the images in them are not as large as those on the site.

Come back in a few weeks, and there will be another set of auctions to browse.

Do I see someone in the back raising their hand? Making a bid? No? A Question. “What about Christies?” you say.

Yes, Christie’s is the other high end art auction site, and you will find some wonderful pieces there as well, but their display is limited to the more common zoom in a box feature, albeit a larger one than usual. The Sotheby’s display is much nicer (though it’s certainly worthwhile browsing through the Christie’s lots).

So take a look through. You never know, you might find something you want to pick up for over the couch.

(Image above, with enlargement from full size image: The Courtship: J.C. Leyendecker; estimate: $30,000 – $50,000)