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The National Gallery of Ireland has opened Rembrandt to Matisse, an exhibition of fifty-seven works on paper drawn from its collection of more than fifteen thousand pieces, while also making its entire prints and drawings collection available for individual viewing.
The National Gallery of Ireland has opened a new exhibition titled Rembrandt to Matisse: A Celebration of European Works on Paper, showcasing fifty-seven works selected from its extensive collection of more than fifteen thousand works on paper, which includes drawings, prints, photographs and miniatures spanning from the fifteenth century to the present day.
The exhibition coincides with Ireland's presidency of the Council of the European Union and was curated by Niamh MacNally, who sought to explore the work of Irish and European artists as well as the artistic conversations, influences and cross-currents that have emerged across centuries. Beyond the exhibition itself, the gallery has taken the significant step of making its entire collection of prints and drawings available for individual viewing, allowing visitors to engage directly with these often delicate and rarely displayed works.
The exhibition invites visitors to consider drawing as an intimate and revealing art form, capturing as it does the initial impulses of the artist's mind. As Henri Matisse once observed, painting and drawing say the same thing, but a drawing is a painting made with reduced means. The lines made with chalk, pastel, etching, ink and graphite carry a sense of human connection that highly polished canvases can sometimes obscure.
Among the highlights is Lorenzo di Credi's A Female Head, created with the ethereal silverpoint technique that required burning animal bones to ash and mixing them with glue made from boiled horse hide and hooves. The silver tip used to draw would leave almost invisible marks at first, gradually oxidising over months to produce a delicate, timeless image of remarkable beauty.
Di Credi, who trained in the same studio as Leonardo da Vinci and inherited the workshop of his master Andrea del Verrocchio while still in his twenties, demonstrates in this work the elegance and refinement of early Renaissance draftsmanship. The earliest piece on display is a Profile Portrait of a Young Man from around 1470, attributed to either Antonio or Piero del Pollaiuolo, a rare survival from an era when many drawings were considered mere working tools and discarded.
Such works are invaluable for building understanding of the development of drawing as a discipline. Other pieces include Gaudenzio Ferrari's The Virgin and Child with Angel Musicians from about 1525, created as a full-scale cartoon for a fresco using the spolvero or pouncing technique, where outlines were pricked with tiny holes and dusted with chalk or charcoal onto fresh lime plaster.
Further highlights range from Jan Peeters I's depiction of Athlone Castle from the 1650s to Jean-Antoine Watteau's elegant Woman Seen from the Back, created around 1716. Together these works demonstrate how artists across five centuries have found in drawing a means of capturing not just images but the very process of thought itself
National Gallery Of Ireland Rembrandt To Matisse European Art Works On Paper Drawing Exhibition
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