Collection: Prints, Drawings, and Photographs

Prints, Drawings, and Photographs

The department of Prints, Drawings + Photographs oversees approximately 18,000 European and American works on paper from the 15th century to the present.

Included in the collection are important examples of Old Master drawings and prints, among them works by Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt and Goya.

The department has one of the largest collections (over 800) of British watercolors in the country. Included among them are fine examples by J.M.W. Turner, George Chinnery, John Sell Cotman, William Blake and Thomas Rowlandson.

The collection of French prints and drawings includes work by Nicolas Poussin, Hubert Robert, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Honoré Daumier, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas Pablo Picasso and others.

Notable in the collection of American watercolors and drawings is work by Benjamin West, Mary Cassatt, Thomas Eakins, Eastman Johnson, Winslow Homer, Maurice Prendergast and Maxfield Parrish.

Among the important 20th-century artists represented in the collection are Franz Kline, James Rosenquist, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell, Jennifer Bartlett, Eric Fischl, Wayne Thiebaud, Kara Walker and Francesco Clemente. The department also oversees a portion of the Nancy Sayles Day Collection of Latin American Art.

The history of the art of the book is represented, in one of its earliest forms, by the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), a masterpiece of Renaissance illumination. In later centuries, work by masters of printing and illustration provides a link between the earliest books and twentieth-century “artists' books” that push limits and challenge traditional interpretations of the form.

A summary of the history of photography is provided by 5,000 photographs, among them significant works by Gustave Le Gray, Julia Margaret Cameron, Nadar, Frederick Sommer, Carrie May Weems, and former RISD professors Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan. The department also oversees the Aaron Siskind Center for the Study of Photography, which is open to photography students and Museum visitors alike.