Prints, Drawings, and Photographs

The Cantor Arts Center collects, interprets, and exhibits works on paper made from the late 15th century to the present. The collection consists of approximately 6,000 prints, 2,000 drawings and watercolors, 4,700 photographs, and more than 200 illustrated books. The Center aspires to demonstrate the development of the graphic arts as fully as possible; it allocates particular attention to significant individual artists, movements, and themes, and to the development of media and techniques.

Throughout the print collection there is thematic depth in portraits and self-portraits of artists, as well as in illustrated title pages and images of gardens. Highlights of the old master print holdings include engravings by Martin Schongauer and Albrecht Dürer and etchings by Jacques Callot and Romeyn de Hooghe. Also strong are lithographs by Eugène Delacroix and Théodore Géricault, the satires of Honoré Daumier, and architectural views by Richard Parkes Bonington. A noteworthy collection of 20th-century prints from the Marmor Foundation features works by Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella.

Significant drawings include fine works by 18th- and 19th-century draftsmen including Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and his son Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, François-André Vincent, John Flaxman, J.M.W. Turner, and Adolph Menzel, as well as some 250 luminous watercolors by William Trost Richards.

The photography collection offers examples of cliché-verre by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, early photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron, and cyanotypes by Anna Atkins and Henry Peter Bosse. The nearly 450 works by Eadweard Muybridge, who worked for Leland Stanford, are of great art historical and institutional significance. More than 160 photographs by Robert Frank enhance the 20th century holdings.

Elizabeth Kathleen Mitchell
Burton and Deedee McMurtry Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs

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