A Selection of Rembrandt Drawings at The Clark

From February 3 to April 22, a selection of Rembrandt drawings will be included in “Drawn to Greatness: Master Drawings from the Thaw Collection” at The Clark in Williamstown, MA. The exhibition is organized by the Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

About the exhibition

“Drawn to Greatness: Master Drawings from the Thaw Collection” highlights 150 exceptional drawings from the Eugene V. Thaw Collection. Assembled over the last fifty years, it is one of the world’s finest private collections of drawings. The exhibition focuses on pivotal moments in the history of the art form, featuring works that represent the pinnacle of each artist’s output. 

A choice group of Rembrandt drawings shows the artist thinking through ideas for figural groupings or compositional details, while several pen-and-ink drawings by the eighteenth-century artist Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo poke fun at the vanities of contemporary society. Drawings by Jean-Antoine Watteau exemplify the artist’s novel use of three colors of chalk to achieve remarkable effects, while a century later Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres created magisterial portrait drawings in spare graphite lines. The rise of the watercolor is evident in works by English artists such as Joseph Mallord William Turner and William Blake in the early nineteenth century, and the variety of media and subject matter from the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist period is revealed in extraordinary works by Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, Paul Gauguin, and Paul Cézanne.

About The Clark

The Clark is one of only a handful of institutions globally with a dual mission as an art museum and a distinguished center for research and higher education, dedicated to advancing and extending the public understanding of art. No other institution of its scale and character has such a complex and exhilarating mission—complex because interrelating the differing purposes of an art museum and a center for research and higher education is so challenging, and exhilarating because the possibilities and implications of this combination are so dynamic.

The Clark’s mission and its geographical location define three essential aspects of its character and identity: the quality of its art, the beauty of its pastoral setting, and the depth of its commitment to the generation of ideas.