A large number of beautifully illustrated catalogues of Spanish drawings have been published in the last ten years, many to accompany exhibitions, as the more fragile treasures of Spanish art are being studied and brought to a wider audience. The Catálogo de la Collección de Dibujos del Instituto Jovellanos de Gijón stands apart from this group, as it is a reprint and enhancement of a catalogue first published in 1969 by a pioneer in the study of Spanish drawings, Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez. Before its demise, the Jovellanos collection of drawings had been catalogued by Jesús Menéndez Acebal in the Catálogo de los Bocetos que existen en el Museo del Instituto de Jovellanos de Gijón, published in 1886. Much of Pérez Sánchez’s work necessarily draws on this first catalogue of the collection, and its attributions.

The latest edition of the catalogue of drawings from the former collection in Gijón speaks to the power of images, as the drawings in question were all lost in a fire that destroyed the Instituto Jovellanos during the Spanish Civil War of 1936. The city council of Gijón has taken the step of commissioning this catalogue, once again reconstructing and reviewing the collection of drawings formed by Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos with the oversight and collaboration of his friend, Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez, author of the Diccionario de los más ilustres profesores de las bellas artes en España (1800).

Pérez Sánchez has not only provided a new edition of his previous catalogue, but also has offered a more complete reconstruction of the lost collection of the Instituto Jovellanos on the basis of several hundred photographs culled from archives and many other sources. The collection was composed of 765 drawings from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, with a particular interest in the techniques used and a focus on drawings that showed process as much as composition. The drawings were mostly Spanish and Italian, but there were also some examples of French, Dutch, and Flemish draftsmanship, and a handful of copies after Dürer. The collection’s formation and intended use as a didactic tool was evident. As noted in the new edition’s introduction by Paz Fernández Felgueroso, the mayor of Gijón, the importance of the collection can be seen in its influence on the artists who studied these drawings.

When the artist Joaquín Sorolla visited the collection on July 10, 1902, the drawings had not been photographed (Javier Barón Thaidigsmann, J. Sorolla y la cornisa cantábrica, Oviedo: Centro de Arte Moderno Ciudad de Oviedo [CAMCO], 1996, 47–48). During Sorolla’s visit, he encouraged the curators to photograph the collection. It can be no coincidence that in 1926 the photographer Ruth Anderson, who worked for Sorolla’s U.S. patron, Archer Milton Huntington, was sent to the Instituto Jovellanos to photograph the drawings that were on exhibit, making precious records of them. Sorolla’s instinct and Anderson’s photographs are part of the reason this publication was at all possible. Anderson’s documentary photographs of the drawings as they were exhibited in the galleries of the museum are still kept in the archives of the Hispanic Society of America, and these important photographs show the drawings in situ in the Instituto Jovellanos as they were displayed, grouped together, and labeled. They are among the few (if not the only) photographs of how the drawings were exhibited prior to their destruction and the loss of the institute, and they allow a haunting reconstruction of the galleries and arrangements of drawings, with their labels.

Pérez Sánchez’s 1969 edition of the catalogue, with an introduction by Enrique Lafuente Ferrari, did not include the watermarks, an integral part of the study of drawings, because this had previously been done in a separate volume published by José Moreno Villa in his 1926 publication, Dibujos del Instituto de Gijón. However, because the 1969 publication did not include the watermarks, scholars were forced to make use of the two rare books side by side in order to have full visual documentation of the collection. Nonetheless, as Lafuente Ferrari wrote in his introduction to the 1969 edition, Pérez Sánchez was able to realize an almost miraculous project; working only with surviving photographs and previous publications, he was able to study and catalogue—better than his predecessors—a collection of drawings that no longer existed.

In this new edition, Pérez Sánchez has reproduced both photographs and watermarks with the entries, making this new edition a significant resource for scholars who study Spanish or Italian drawings. Together with his previous cataloguing, he has updated the provenance, bibliography, and in a very few cases the attributions of the drawings that were lost in 1936. In one entry, due to recent scholarship, Pérez Sánchez tantalizingly suggests that perhaps some drawings survived the fire.

The fact that numerous watermarks are reproduced next to the black-and-white images with the entries substantially enhances the catalogue’s value. The book is further augmented by a name index and an index of drawing titles with a concordance to the Moreno Villa catalogue. Some of the artists described and discussed in this catalogue were only known by the drawings that Jovellanos had collected, and their entire surviving body of work was destroyed in the fire of 1936. For instance, of the four drawings known for Angelo Nardi (an Italian painter who worked at the court of Philip III), three are lost, and the other was destroyed in Gijón. Some drawings that have helped establish the graphic style for a certain artist, like Eugenio Cajés’s squared preparatory drawing for the painting The Virgin and Christ at Calvary (Madrid, Convento de Mercedarias de Don Juan de Alarcón), were once at Gijón and are known only through photographs. Of the handful of drawings attributed to Juan de Arfe y Villafañe, an important sculptor of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, the majority were at Gijón and are now lost (only one survives in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid).

Although there are problems with the catalogue, as might be expected since it is based on a photographic reconstruction of the collection, these quibbles are minor. The quality of some of the reproductions suffers because they had to be enlarged from existing photographs or aged negatives of poor quality. However, with the inclusion of useful indices, watermarks, larger photographs than in the previous edition, and cross-referencing to the 1929 Moreno Villa catalogue, Pérez Sánchez has refined an important tool for the study of both Italian and Spanish drawings, as well as the history of collecting.

By chance, a few signed prints were also included among the drawings. Copies after Dürer prints, along with drawings by Rembrandt, Tintoretto, Jacques Callot, Domenichino, and Luca Cambiaso copies after Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, and Caravaggio were among the treasures lost at Gijón. A preparatory drawing by Romulo Cincinnato for his famous Martyrdom of San Mauricio and the Theban Legion, painted in 1584 and now in the Basilica of El Escorial, is known only through its inclusion here, although it has served as the point of comparison for numerous drawings by Cincinnato.

Overall, this thoughtful edition contributes a great deal to the scholarship of Spanish drawings, and it further attests to Pérez Sánchez’s encyclopedic knowledge of the field, while refining his earlier solid contributions in the Corpus of Spanish Drawings (with Diego Angulo Iñiguez, London: Harvey Miller, 1975–1985) and the Historia del Dibujo en España de la Edad Media a Goya (Madrid: Cátedra Cuadernos Arte, 1986).