Prints & Drawings

The prints and drawings collection includes more than 20,000 works on paper as well as several hundred illuminated manuscripts and printed books by artists from Europe, Africa, and the Americas from the fourteenth century to the present. The foundation of the collection was established in the 1930s and ’40s by gifts and bequests from Princeton alumni Junius S. Morgan and Dan Fellows Platt, then Museum Director Frank Jewett Mather Jr., and Professor Clifton R. Hall. The last also left an endowment, the Laura P. Hall Memorial Fund, to the Art and Archaeology Department at Princeton University, which was intended for the purchase of prints and drawings for the Museum’s holdings, and which continues to grow the collection today.  

 Among the strengths of the collection are substantial holdings of prints by Jacques Callot and Hendrick Goltzius; key works by important printmakers such as Martin Schongauer, Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt van Rijn, and Francisco Goya; sixteenth- through eighteenth-century Italian drawings, with outstanding groups by Luca Cambiaso, Guercino, and the Tiepolos; Spanish Renaissance and Baroque drawings; British works on paper, with notable groups by George Romney and Samuel Palmer; American drawings and watercolors, including major examples by Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, and Georgia O’Keeffe; and a significant collection of works by leading modern and contemporary Latin American artists such as Rufino Tamayo and Francisco Toledo. In recent decades, collecting the work of Black American artists has been and continues to be a priority, with recent acquisitions ranging from Edward Bannister to Emma Amos. Strengthening the Museum's holdings of work from outside Europe and the United States has likewise been prioritized, highlighted by the recent additions of modernist Brazilian and African prints and drawings, including works by Tarsila do Amaral and Ben Enwonwu.