FROM THE HANDS OF THE MASTERS
Unveiling Old Master Drawings from Canada's Foremost Private Collection
April 11 to July 7, 2013
Graphic Arts Centre
Jean-Noël Desmarais Pavilion - Level S2
Free admission at all times
Montreal is privileged to be the home of Canada's Foremost private collection of Old Master drawings, spanning five centuries of artistic creativity. The exhibition From the Hands of the Masters features a selection of works that reveal artists at their most intimate – working out compositions, exploring ideas, recording sights and imagining others – and range from the immediacy of rapid sketches to the refined beauty of finished creations for presentation. The range of artists represented is matched by the diversity of their national origins, their subjects – from figural to compositional studies, from landscapes to myths and allegories – and their choices of medium. Executed in pen and ink, brush, black chalk, red chalk, white chalk, gouache and wash, these beautiful sheets comprise an outstanding testimony to connoisseurship. The Montreal exhibition will be the first to present the majority of them together.
François Boucher (1703-1770). La coquette (detail), pastel on tan paper, 21.6 x 16.2 cm, Montreal, Private Collection