old master drawings - Museum of Fine Arts - Florida State University

The History of Old Masters and their DrawingsFebruary/March2009The term Old Master is often used to describe a European painter of skillwho was born before the 19 th century. As time has passed, other importantartists born in the 1800s have also been considered Old Masters. In theory, anOld Master should be an artist who was fully trained, was a master of his localartists’ guild, and also worked independently. Old Master Drawings are soclassified mainly because of the medium and support employed, and the dateof the work. The medium that was used most often was chalk, pen & ink,and/or brush & wash. Usually the works were supported by paper butsometimes vellum or parchment was used.Drawings of the Old Masters were not only admired for their beauty, butalso served as teaching tools and provided a means for studying the methodsand styles of the artists who changed the course of art. The sixteenth andseventeenth centuries were also a period when biographies of the greatRenaissance artists were being written by authors such as Vasari, Baldinucciand Van Mander. These biographies familiarized the public with the OldMasters and established them as admirable people who became the foundationof academic art. In the eighteenth century, recognition of their work wasbrought to a much wider audience with the development of new printingprocesses, such as engraving and mezzotint.The term “Old Master” tends to be avoided by art historians because ofits vagueness. The terms Old Master prints and Old Master drawings,however, are still used and the designation remains more current in the arttrade. Drawings from the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, andnineteenth centuries seem old to us now and establishing a dividing linebetween the old and the modern becomes an increasingly difficult task. Evenso, issues of chronology and terminology aside, there are significant differencesbetween the materials and techniques of drawing from the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries as compared to ones from centuries up to 400 years earlier.Rembrandt, Saul with his Servants at the Fortune-teller of Endor,1657, drawing in bister and reed pen on paper with nowatermark, Museum Bredius, The Netherlands.Background Information Page 8