Drawings and Prints
Selections from the Permanent Collection

 

 

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To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, fought July 1–3, 1863, a large selection of American prints related to the Civil War will be on view, including wood engravings designed by Winslow Homer and Thomas Nast for Harper’s Weekly, panoramic summations of major battles, and portrait prints issued by New York lithographic publisher Currier & Ives. Anti-Union caricatures etched in Baltimore by Adalbert Volck represent the viewpoint of Confederate sympathizers. Cumulatively, these images reflect the complexity of the war and point to the suffering endured and heroism displayed by soldiers who fought and those who supported them behind the lines. Several works from Kara Walker’s 2005 portfolio, Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated) create a contemporary foil to the nineteenth-century wartime prints.

There is also a selection of oversize woodcuts from the sixteenth century, including Andrea Andreani monumental Rape of the Sabines and Jan van Scorel’s skillfully hand-colored Deluge. There is a grouping of nineteenth-century portrait drawings with works by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Sir Thomas Lawrence, and Franz Xaver Winterhalter; this thematic group also features French, German, and British painted miniatures from the same period. A selection of prints, drawings, and illustrated books featuring architectural imagery from the eighteenth century to the present will also be on view. This grouping includes work by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Max Klinger, Charles Demuth and a new acquisition by Nicola López, who was recently commissioned to create a site-specific work for the Balcony Lounge.