History of the collection
Introduction
The Department of Prints and Drawings, founded in 1808, is one
of the oldest departments in the British Museum. It is home to the
national collection of drawings and prints and includes a
comprehensive collection of work by all the great old
masters, as well as lesser known works of great historical and
social interest.
The original collection was split off from the Library
Departments (now housed in the British Library) and was formed from
parts of the collections of Sir Hans Sloane, which had come at the
foundation of the Museum in 1753, and the bequests of William
Fawkener in 1769, and the Rev. C.M. Cracherode in 1799. In 1818 the
department acquired the collection of printed ephemera formed by
Sarah Banks, the eccentric sister of Sir Joseph Banks.
Development
In the 1820s the curatorial staff began to build on these
collections. Over the next forty years generous grants from the
Government enabled the purchase of prints on a large scale. Major
acquisitions were made of William Smith's collection of early
German and Italian engraving, and Edward Hawkins' collection of
British satirical prints.
The first catalogues were written in the 1870s, but it was under
the Keepership of Sir Sidney Colvin that Campbell Dodgson, Lawrence
Binyon, A.M. Hind and A.E. Popham were appointed. Their scholarly
publications gave the department the international reputation that
it retains to the present day.
Colvin realised that the collection of drawings needed to be
built up, and was responsible for the purchase of the Malcolm
collection in 1895. This contained over 1,000 old master drawings
of the highest quality. In the same period William Mitchell gave
his collection of German Renaissance woodcuts, George Salting
bequeathed a remarkable group of old master prints and drawings,
and Baron Cheylesmore his collection of portrait mezzotint
prints.
Since World War II, there have been major additions. In 1946
Count Antoine Seilern donated the main bulk of the
Phillipps-Fenwick collection of old master drawings. In 1949
Campbell Dodgson, former Keeper of the Department, bequeathed over
5,000 works, mostly prints from the previous 75 years. In 1968
sixteen outstanding nineteenth-century French drawings were
bequeathed by the collector César Mange de Hauke. Since the
mid-1970s considerable efforts have been made to acquire good
examples of modern drawing and printmaking.
Collection and acquisition
The Museum’s collection of old master drawings and prints is one
of the greatest in the world. There are groups of drawings by
Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo (including his only
surviving full-scale cartoon), Dürer, Rubens, Rembrandt, Claude and
Watteau. Virtually complete collections of the works of all the
great printmakers include holdings of prints by Dürer, Rembrandt
and Goya.
There are over 30,000 British drawings and watercolours with
important examples of work by Hogarth, Sandby, Turner, Girtin,
Constable, Cotman, Cox, Gillray, Rowlandson and Cruikshank, as well
as all the great Victorians. There are about a million British
prints including over 20,000 satires and excellent collections of
works by William Blake and Thomas Bewick.
The modern collection is less comprehensive, but includes
collections of French lithographs of the post-Impressionist period,
German Expressionist, British, American, Australian and
Scandinavian prints, Henry Moore's Shelter Sketchbook and prints by
Picasso and his contemporaries in twentieth-century Paris.
Underpinning these masterpieces are lesser-known works of great
interest: 69 fifteenth-century niello plates (decorative silver
plates inlaid with a black compound); a group of 75 watercolours by
John White (active 1585-93), which are some of the earliest
European views of America; 1,000 botanical collages by the
eighteenth-century ‘blue-stocking' Mary Delany; and nearly 1400
watercolours of everyday life in London by the German artist George
Scharf who settled in the city after the Battle of Waterloo.
The collection also contains hundreds of thousands of prints
reproducing paintings from the sixteenth century up until the era
of photography; tens of thousands of engraved portraits; large
documentary collections of historical prints and topography
(including the Crace collection of around 6,160 views of London)
and collections of printed ephemera, such as trade and visiting
cards, fans, bookplates, playing cards and toy-theatre prints.
Factsheets
The department has produced a number of factsheets that provide
introductions to artists whose work is represented in the
collection, as well as particular areas of the
collection.
They can all be downloaded in pdf format:
Artists