Enfilade

From The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar:

A Pioneering Collection: Master Drawings from the Crocker Art Museumm
Portland Art Museum, Oregon, 12 June — 19 September 2010
Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California, 10 October 2010 — 6 February 2011
Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, 16 September — 11 December 2011

Hubert Robert, "Massacre of the Innocents," 1796, chalk, brown, and red, on paper, 8 1/4 in. x 7 1/4 in. (Sacramento: Crocker Art Museum)

A Pioneering Collection: Master Drawings from the Crocker Art Museum includes 57 rarely seen works by artists such as Albrecht Durer, Fra Bartolommeo, Anthonie van Dyck, Francois Boucher, and Jean-Auguste-Cominque Ingres. The exhibition is divided thematically into four sections of drawings from Italy, the Low Countries, France, and Central Europe.

These drawings date from the late 15th- to the mid-19th centuries and were purchased between 1869-71 by forward-thinking railroad magnate E. B. Crocker, forming the basis of the Crocker Museum’s master drawings collection. In total, the Crockers purchased 1344 master drawings and 700 paintings during their time in Europe and these formed the basis of their private art gallery, which opened in 1872, featuring visitors like the queen of Hawaii and former U.S. President Grant. Following the death of Edwin Crocker, his wife Margaret transferred the gallery to the California Museum Association, now the Crocker Art Museum. Their old master drawing collection was one of the first historically to be opened to the
public in 1885.

This exhibition was organized in celebration of the Crocker’s Anne and Malcolm McHenry Works on Paper Study Center and exhibition space, designed to significantly enhance public access to this collection of master drawings.

A catalogue by lead author and Crocker Art Museum curator Wiliam Breazeale; Cara Dufour Denison, curator at the Morgan Library and Museum; Stacey Sell, associate curator of Old Master drawings at the National Gallery of Art, and Freyda Spira, research associate at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, accompanies the exhibition and will be available at the Art Center gift shop (Paul Holberton Publishing, 2010, $35).

A full checklist for the exhibition is available here»