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.