Treasures on Paper from the Collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art

Treasures on Paper showcases more than seventy of the museum’s finest prints and drawings acquired throughout the institution’s history. Masterpieces such as a series of fifty fifteenth-century engravings hand-colored in gold by the Master of the E-Series Tarocchi illustrating a philosophical hierarchy of the universe, as well as a dazzling watercolor of horses fighting by the young Romantic artist Théodore Géricault, helped lay the foundations of the collection in the 1920s. The tradition of acquiring beautiful, rare, historically significant prints and drawings has continued into the twenty-first century. An extremely rare impression of The Rabbit Hunt, the only print Peter Bruegel the Elder etched himself, became a crown jewel of the collection of Dutch and Flemish prints in 2009, and in 2011 a minutely detailed watercolor of the Roman Campagna by Carl Ludwig Hackert was added to the growing collection of plein-air landscapes. Magnificent gifts have immeasurably enriched the collection. One of Michelangelo’s red chalk studies for the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was given by George S. Kendrick and Harry D. Kendrick in memory of their uncle Henry G. Dalton in 1940, and Giulio Campagnola’s engraving Venus Reclining in a Landscape, acquired by the Print Club during the Great Depression when it was de-accessioned by the struggling Hermitage Museum, attests to the continuous generosity of the museum’s benefactors. The museum’s history of collecting and connoisseurship will unfold for viewers in Treasures on Paper.

The exhibition will include works of art ranging from the fifteenth- through the nineteenth centuries. Visitors will discover examples of the earliest surviving woodcuts and engravings made in Germany during the mid-1400s; masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance and the northern Baroque; quintessential examples of French Neo-Classicism; sublime landscapes of the eighteenth century; and Symbolist visions of fin-de-siècle Europe. The museum’s rich holdings of prints and drawings by masters such as Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt van Rijn, Edgar Degas, and Winslow Homer will be highlighted.