From Drawing to Painting

Pierre Rosenberg is honorary president of the Musée du Louvre in Paris, where he was director from 1994 to 2001. A member of the Académie Française, he has published extensively on painting and drawing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and has organized numerous exhibitions throughout the world. His books include Only in America and Chardin.

• PREFACE INTRODUCTION ix CHAPTER 1 Five Exceptional Artists 2 CHAPTER 2 The Drawings: Their Histories, Techniques, and Themes 26 CHAPTER 3 Practice and Idea 66 CHAPTER 4 On the Attribution and Dating of the Drawings 96 CHAPTER 5 Drawing and Money 144 CHAPTER 6 Drawing and Design 176 NOTES 211 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 234 INDEX 238

"Beginning with a general introduction to the background and style of each artist's work, Rosenberg discusses what the drawings meant to each artist, who collected them, how drawings fit into the practice of the creation of paintings, and the tricky practice of attributing drawings."--Library Journal "[A] wonderful, charming and witty book... The scholarship is personable and engaging, yet unobtrusive. A book for everyone, and a model of the unity, and expansiveness, of the art historical enterprise."--Choice "Rosenberg poses in six chapters a series of basic questions on the nature, function, and connoisseurship of drawings. 'Basic' is, or course, a deceptive word, for the most basic questions can be the most challenging to answer. For general audiences, this book ... is the equivalent of a tour with a patient guide through terrain that otherwise might be perceived as rarified or inhospitable... For specialists, this volume of synthesis and reflection will prove a useful complement to the weighty compilations of fact and documentation in the catalogues raisonnes... One can hope that younger scholars will be inspired to follow Rosenberg's example and give equal attention to drawing and painting as two sides of the same coin, as, of course, they are."--Perrin Stein, Master Drawings