Enfilade

Varieties of Romantic Experience: Drawings from the Collection of Charles Ryskamp
New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, 4 February — 25 April 2010

ISBN: 0300152922 (Yale University Press), $75

In 1824, the Scottish painter David Wilkie wrote to the director of the French Royal Museums, “It is time to show that the arts are cosmopolitan and that all national prejudice is foreign to them.” In spite of Wilkie’s fine sentiment, drawings by British artists from the Romantic period have rarely been considered alongside those produced across the Channel. In response, this remarkable exhibition will take up the challenge of treating Romanticism as an international phenomenon by bringing together nearly two hundred British, French, German, Danish, and Dutch drawings from the outstanding collection of Charles Ryskamp (MA ’51, PhD ’56), Professor Emeritus, Princeton University, and Director Emeritus of the Pierpont Morgan Library and The Frick Collection in New York. The first exhibition of this scope dedicated to northern European drawings, it will consider the place of British art in a European milieu.

Varieties of Romantic Experience: Drawings from the Collection of Charles Ryskamp will explore the direct relationship between British and Continental artists during the Romantic period (here defined as the period between the French Revolution in 1789 and the revolutions of 1848). Despite the very different circumstances in which artists across Europe were working, and the diverse modes of representation they employed, they shared common concerns and frequently explored similar themes. The exhibition and accompanying book will focus on Romanticism’s novel exploration of two worlds in particular: nature and the imagination.

Varieties of Romantic Experience: Drawings from the Collection of Charles Ryskamp features more than two hundred works on paper acquired during Professor Ryskamp’s fifty years as a collector, ranging from drawings purchased while a student at Cambridge to recent additions. His earliest acquisitions in the 1950s were British drawings, an area of interest that complemented his enthusiasm for English eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, which he studied at Yale and Cambridge Universities and later taught at Princeton University. Once Professor Ryskamp became director of the Pierpont Morgan Library in 1969, his collecting interests broadened to include an array of Continental drawings from the Old Masters to contemporary works. More than half the drawings on display are by leading British artists; the rest are evenly distributed among the northern European schools. Alongside important British works by J.M.W. Turner, Cornelius Varley, William Blake, and Henry Fuseli, are drawings by key Continental artists, such as Caspar David Friedrich, Camille Corot, Eugène Delacroix, and Edgar Degas. A guiding principle in Charles Ryskamp’s collecting was to search out uncommon works, those not typically found in the study rooms of the world’s major museums. This focus led him to assemble one of the finest collections of Danish Golden Age drawings in private hands. As a consequence, this exhibition has a comprehensive scope that demonstrates the real cosmopolitanism of Romantic art and the remarkable depth and breadth of the varieties of Romantic experience.

Varieties of Romantic Experience: Drawings from the Collection of Charles Ryskamp has been organized by Matthew Hargraves, Assistant Curator for Collections Research at the Center, in association with Charles Ryskamp. It is accompanied by a fully illustrated volume of thematic essays by Matthew Hargraves, with a preface by Charles Ryskamp, published by the Yale Center for British Art in association with Yale University Press.