According to Henri Matisse, “painting and drawing say the same thing”, but “a drawing is a painting made with reduced means”.
Is that true? Is drawing the undersung younger sibling of paint? If that’s the case, Rembrandt to Matisse, the exhibition of European works on paper at the National Gallery of Ireland, shows that perhaps drawing’s limelight moment has come.
Through lines on paper made with chalk, pastel, etching, ink and graphite, there is something enticingly intimate about a drawing. Those lines, the mind knows, were made by a hand, just like our own, and the sense of connection may be more believable than when looking at so many of art history’s highly polished paintings.
“It’s the initial idea of the artist, down on paper,” the exhibition’s curator, Niamh MacNally, says. “You’re looking at the artist’s mind working.”
Whereas history’s celebrated canvases tend to require a stepping back to assess them, drawing invites you in. And if colours continue to glow in oil paint across time, the ways in which men and women, angels and demons, castles and collapsing cottages can come to life through the gap of centuries, with little more than a clutch of lines and patches of shading, is almost more miraculous when looking at works on paper.
Take the transubstantive magic in silverpoint. To make a silverpoint etching, according to MacNally, you would have needed to burn animal bones to ash and mix them with glue, probably made with boiled horse hide and hooves.
Covering the page with this unpleasant-sounding and, most likely, unpleasant-smelling substance, you would then draw with a silver tip, perhaps using something as fine as a wire held by a wooden rod.
Initially your lines would be almost invisible, but as the silvered markings oxidised – a process that could take months – your image would emerge. So transcendent beauty comes about through the sense of belief required to make invisible marks in the very materials of life and death. It’s quite the metaphor.
That ethereal beauty of silverpoint, so at odds with the physicality of its ingredients, is definitely the case with Lorenzo di Credi’s A Female Head, in which the downcast gaze of a young woman is held in a few spare lines.
The resulting image is delicate and timeless, and it takes an imaginative leap to acknowledge that it was made in the 1480s, more than 500 years ago.
Di Credi trained in the same studio as Leonardo da Vinci, and you can see the elements of style that echo between the pair. Di Credi was clearly a prodigy; he would inherit the workshop of his master, Andrea del Verrocchio, when he was still in his 20s, although it is obviously Leonardo who is the best remembered of the old masters today.
A Female Head is among the 57 works on show, which MacNally selected from the National Gallery’s collection of more than 15,000 works on paper, which includes drawings, prints, photographs and miniatures, and which spans works from the 15th century to the present day.
The occasion of Ireland’s presidency of the Council of the European Union helped MacNally whittle the selection down a little, as she looked for ways to explore the work of Irish and European artists, and the artistic conversations, influences and cross-currents that have emerged since the earliest piece on show.
That work is Profile Portrait of a Young Man, from around 1470, by either Antonio or Piero del Pollaiuolo. “Early Renaissance drawings like this are rare,” MacNally says. “Many would have been seen as working drawings and would have been discarded. But they are invaluable for building our understanding of the development of drawing.”
Some were working drawings; some come from that vital tool for all artists: the sketchbook; others, such as Gaudenzio Ferrari’s The Virgin and Child with Angel Musicians, from about 1525, were made as cartoons for frescoes.
These full-scale drawings would have their outlines pricked with tiny holes. In a technique known as spolvero, or pouncing – pounce is a fine powder – the drawings would then be placed on to fresh lime plaster and dusted with chalk or charcoal, to leave the outline drawing on the wall.
Look closely at the cartoon and you can see those pounce holes. There is plenty of close looking going on at the exhibition – so much so that MacNally frequently pauses to rub at the glass that fronts the display cases.
Given their fragility and sensitivity to light, works on paper tend to be less often displayed, and some of these pieces are on exhibition at the National Gallery for the first time.
Indeed, the terms of its Henry Vaughan bequest of watercolours by JMW Turner, in 1900, stipulated that they could be shown only in January, when light levels are low. The gallery continues to honour that, and the annual new-year showing of the Vaughan Turners always feels like a special event.
But time and technology move on, and since 2018 the Print Gallery series of rooms are fitted with special lighting and nonreflective glass that is so finely engineered as to be almost invisible; hence the finger and nose prints that MacNally is assiduously rubbing away.
“People really want to get close to works on paper,” she says, smiling, as we look at one of the gallery’s more recent acquisitions, Rembrandt’s Landscape with Cottages and a Hay Barn, dated 1641, and purchased in 2023.
“There’s such a network of tiny lines, and it’s surprisingly modern, with all the space of the sky, but people feel the need to get close and, say, spot that little figure that’s walking their dog along the Amstel river.”
How much of the almost magnetic pull of the piece comes from reading the label and knowing it’s a Rembrandt? MacNally points out how attributions can change over time, but should that change our appreciation of an artwork? We stop to look at a figure of St Catherine of Alexandria from 1513, exquisitely rendered in ink.
It is by either Albrecht Dürer or Hans von Kulmbach. Does Dürer’s monogram at the bottom right not seal the deal? MacNally says that the monogram was most likely added later, by someone else, but she adds that doesn’t mean it’s not Dürer.
Art is full of such mysteries and conundrums. So what’s in a name? The drawing is both remarkable and beautiful, yet the fame of an artist adds layers of story, as well as the weight of the value of all their other works.
Try as we might, it seems only human to want to understand things in context, however skewed that context may be. One of the most powerful things about great art is the way it can sit between the two, susceptible on one level but resolutely itself underneath it all.
Not all the works are studies or sketches, early workings for the bigger “real thing”. A pair of pastels by the Venetian artist Rosalba Carriera from the 1740s glow in their frames. According to the meticulous and intriguing catalogue notes, Carriera’s portraits were one of the must-buys for the wealthy on their Grand Tours of Europe. This pair once hung at Russborough House, in Co Wicklow.
If Carriera’s works were the souvenirs of the day, 18th-century miniatures were, arguably, the first selfies. Made as mementoes, betrothal tokens and love tokens, five of them are shown in this exhibition. Fascinating as they are, they are slightly out of kilter with the narratives of artistic development, conversations and influence that emerge through the rooms.
Those conversations include those taking place between a trio of works depicting dancers, from the Edgar Degas pastel of two ballerinas in a dressingroom at the Paris Opéra, from around 1880, via Pablo Picasso’s pair from the Ballets Russes, in 1925, to Henri Matisse’s Dancer Reflected in the Mirror, from 1927.
Working within the space of just a generation, and with their own distinct styles, they clearly have in common the physicality and strength of the female dancers they depict. These are athletes. They are also human and, caught pre- or post-performance, reflective, readying, supportive of one another, and tired.
From here the exhibition moves on to also encompass German expressionism, including, poignantly, artists such as Emil Nolde, who were declared degenerate by the Nazi regime and banned from making, exhibiting or selling their work.
Nolde and so many of his colleagues persisted, and his work from that period includes the haunting watercolour Rain over a Marsh, from 1938, on show here. Proving Matisse right, Nolde had turned to watercolour when ostracism limited his access to materials. Art will out.
The gallery’s prints and drawings collection is an extraordinary resource. And while the digitisation of museum collections accelerated during the pandemic, the experience of viewing art online underlined that however great the world’s digital archives are, they are no match for the real.
The National Gallery of Ireland’s collection of works on paper is too fragile to be part of the growing global trend of “visible storage” in museums (such as at the V&A East Storehouse, in London), but the collection is truly open access. Anyone, whether student, scholar, academic or any other interested person, can make an appointment to view individual works in person at the Prints and Drawings Study Room.
MacNally notes that you need to specify the piece you would like to see, and she cautions against expecting an instant appointment, but she and the Study Room team are justifiably proud.
“It gives people a real idea of how artists work, or how they worked at the time. I know when I was studying art history, these kinds of spaces were never open to us.”
Relatively small in scale, the Print Gallery is housed in just three (perfectly engineered) rooms, but this exhibition opens up a remarkable series of worlds, and a collection that is now available to us all. A truly remarkable thing.
Rembrandt to Matisse: A Celebration of European Works on Paper is at the National Gallery of Ireland until Sunday, December 6th. Admission is free. Accompanying events include a family drop-in workshop on French Village Collage, on Sunday, September 13th; a talk-and-tea session with Niamh MacNally on Tuesday, September 22nd; and a drawing workshop on Thursday, September 24th; booking is at nationalgallery.ie. Make an appointment to view a work from the Print and Drawings collection, or from the gallery’s wider archives of correspondence, manuscripts and photographs, by emailing [email protected]