Facilities and services
The Department of Prints and Drawings is devoted to serving
the public interest, which it is able to do in many different
ways.
The most important ways are through the exhibition programme, by
which selections from the collection are put on show for periods of
three or four months, and through the Study Room, where any visitor
can ask to see any object in the collection on demand (there is
only one item that is restricted on the grounds of its extreme
fragility).
We do our best to answer public enquiries by post, fax or email.
Since we do not have the staff or expertise to answer all possible
questions, we can only cope with enquiries that are about areas or
objects that are covered in our own area of collecting.
We can help teachers who wish to teach in front of objects in
the collection, by arranging for them to bring parties of their
students on group visits to the Study Room where we can put out
small selections of drawings and prints chosen by themselves.
We offer a service to try to identify Western works of art on
paper that belong to and are brought in by members of the public,
and saying what we can to help them.
We offer a photographic service, and orders can be placed for
digital images or black and white or colour prints of any work in
the collection.
We lend works from the collection to exhibitions mounted in the
United Kingdom and abroad by responsible bodies and organisations.
Some of these loans are tours mounted by the department in
collaboration with partner bodies; but the great majority are of
one or more works to exhibitions whose organisers wish to borrow
from us.
The department is open on weekdays 10.00-13.00 and
14.15-16.00.
You can find the department on the fourth floor of the Museum,
via the Prints and Drawings gallery, in room 90.