OLD MASTER DRAWINGS

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29146, 5 March 1960, Page 11

OLD MASTER DRAWINGS

Productions At Durham Street

A comprehensive collection of reproductions of old master drawings is the first of the series of exhibitions which the Society of Arts plans to hold at the Durham Street Art Gallery this year. The reproductions, which are from the collection of the society’s new secretary (Mr Andre Brooke), are of generally high quality; in some cases they are spectacularly realistic. All are the same size as the originals. Few are drawings which are frequently reproduced; many of the originals were in’ the Esterhazy collection in Hungary. The exhibition, which is set out in chronological order, begins with some medieval Austrian and Bohemian work of no special interest, but an ink drawing by an early fifteenth century master from Lombardy is distinguished by a curious hallucinatory quality. Then comes a group of Renaissance drawings, headed by four by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), most of them very well known, but none of them is finer than a pen drawing by Raphael which is nearby.

Three drawings by Albrecht Durer (1471-1528) show the TeuI tonic harshness as well as the | lyricism which characterise the work of that great draughtsman. I Similar but more mannered ; lyricism is found in a chalk i drawing of 1536 by another great ■ German graphic artist, Hans Baldung Grien. A splendid pen drawing by the I seventeenth - century Bolognese painter, Guido Reni, has a virility . not as a rule found in his paintI ings. Another pen drawing by i Salvator Rosa (1615-1673), the Neapolitan who was musician, actor and poet as well as one of the precursors of romantic landscape painting, has a tense nervous line of some individuality. A seventeenth-century painter at work on compositional problems can be seen in a sheet of delightful drawings by Carlo Maratta. But finest of all is a group of drawings by the great Rembrandt van Rijn, who could create effects of glowing majesty with a few strokes of a pen or brush, as his “A Scholar at Work” shows. "Haman Falls Into Disgrace,” from Rembrandt’s last years, is magnificent expressive calligraphy. The exhibition ends with a typically fresh, open-air chalk drawing by Gainsborough. If the society’s other exhibitions during the year convey a fraction of the vitality and spirit of these reproductions of drawings it will be a rewarding year. —J.N.K.