This exhibition is no longer on view at the National Gallery. Please follow the links below for related online resources or visit our current exhibitions schedule.

Related Resources Exhibition Overview Works in the Gallery's Collection by Glenn Ligon Pietro Perugino Albrecht Altdorfer Paul Sandby Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Georgia O'Keeffe Richard Diebenkorn Albrecht Dürer Rembrandt van Rijn Jusepe de Ribera Pablo Picasso View Related Prints and Drawings Collection Tours Print Study Rooms Press Materials

The National Gallery of Art presents 142 of the finest works of art on paper acquired by the museum through gifts and purchases over the past five years. On public exhibition for the first time, they range chronologically from the earliest German drawing on paper to come to America, Christ Kneeling in Prayer (c. 1425), to etchings by Glenn Ligon from the 1990s.

Among the major drawings in the exhibition are Renaissance works by Pietro Perugino and Albrecht Altdorfer; Paul Sandby's masterpiece of light and color, Dawn in Luton Park (1763/1765); Giuseppe Bennuci's giant presentation drawing of alternative architectural illusions for the ceiling of the Ognissanti church in Florence (c. 1769); a wide range of 18th- and 19th-century French and German landscape watercolors; Toulouse-Lautrec's charming A Monkey Playing on His Back; and a series of 20th-century American drawings, including works by Georgia O'Keeffe and Richard Diebenkorn.

Among the outstanding prints and illustrated books to be shown is the finest impression of the earliest engraved portrait, Sanctus Bernhardus (1450-1475); the first printed travel book with illustrations, including a fold-out woodcut view of Venice more than four-feet long; an Albrecht Dürer woodcut printed on blue paper; dramatic etchings by Rembrandt and Jusepe de Ribera; and one of the finest impressions of Picasso's early masterpiece, The Frugal Repast (1904).