The Department of Drawings and Prints boasts more than one million drawings, prints, and illustrated books made in Europe and the Americas from around 1400 to the present day. Because of their number and sensitivity to light, the works can only be exhibited for a limited period. To highlight the vast range of works on paper, the department organizes four rotations a year in the Robert Wood Johnson, Jr. Gallery. Each installation is the product of a collaboration among curators and consists of up to 100 objects grouped by artist, technique, style, period, or subject.
Featuring a variety of works spanning the seventeenth to the twentieth century, this installation touches on the theme of city and country. It includes recently acquired Netherlandish landscape drawings as well as British and Swedish landscapes from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; it further spotlights work depicting beached whales, a popular subject in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Holland. Other sections highlight French Neoclassical drawings that illustrate the ever-shifting allegiances at the end of the eighteenth century and works by French women artists of the same period, with a particular focus on the relationships between these artists, their materials and techniques, and their participation in the French Revolution. City and Country also features self-portraits across time, scenes of city dwellers and urban window-shoppers, and a selection of British propaganda posters and trade cards from World War II in commemoration of the eightieth anniversary of the war’s end.