Published in conjunction with the exhibition by the same title, The Essence of Line: French Drawings from Ingres to Degas is a study of the superb nineteenth-century French drawings collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Walters Art Museum, and the Peabody Institute Art Collection of the Maryland State Archives (on loan to the Baltimore Museum of Art). The core holdings of drawings at each institution are private collections amassed by Baltimoreans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that, quite remarkably, have remained intact, thereby providing scholars a window into period taste and connoisseurship. Four essays, by Cheryl Snay, William Johnston, Jay McKean Fisher, and Kimberly Schenck, explore attitudes toward drawing and the penchant for French art in Baltimore, the formation of the drawings collections at the Walters Art Museum (the WAM) and the Baltimore Museum of Art (the BMA), and the drawing materials and techniques employed by nineteenth-century artists. A team of twelve highly qualified scholars contributed to the well-researched and sumptuously illustrated catalogue, which includes 106 works, many rarely seen or published.

Taken as a whole, the collections of William and Henry Walters, Charles James Madison Eaton, George Lucas, and the Cone sisters offer an overview of nineteenth-century French art ranging from figure studies in the Neoclassical style, to the naturalistic landscapes of the Barbizon School, to the otherworldly visions of the Symbolists. Represented in the catalogue are the most famous French artists of the century, notably Jacques-Louis David, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Eugène Delacroix, Édouard Manet, and Edgar Degas, as well as less well-known practitioners, such as Alexandre Bida, Alfred Dehodencq, and Félix Ziem. Their drawings range from preparatory sketches to highly finished independent images, and they exemplify the implementation of an array of drawing materials.

In recent years, French drawings have been the focus of a number of exhibitions and publications including Carter E. Foster, French Master Drawings from the Collection of Muriel Butkin (Cleveland Museum of Art, 2001); Jan Würtz Frandsen, Drawn toward the Avant-Garde: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century French Drawings from the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Copenhagen (Alexandria, VA: Art Services International, 2002); and Perrin Stein, French Drawings from the British Museum: Clouet to Seurat (London and New York: British Museum Press and Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005). These publications share with The Essence of Line the admirable goal of acquainting both scholars and the public with the abundance of French drawings in public and private collections, many of which are rarely exhibited and often not fully catalogued or published. In contrast to most recent publications, typically focused on style or the role of individual works in the construction of a modernist vision, The Essence of Line breaks new ground in the exploration of questions of taste in the acquisition and display of drawings, as well as in the discussion of the educational concerns that inspired and shaped these Baltimore collections.

In the opening essay, “Mise en scène,” Snay, the research associate for the Walters Art Museum and the Baltimore Museum of Art charged with the catalogue research project (now Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, TX), takes a provocative new approach to the study of nineteenth-century drawings by examining period attitudes toward drawing and how these shaped the formation of Baltimore’s major collections. Operating under the guiding influence of French culture and ideas, certain Baltimore collectors believed that the experience of studying drawings, and the process of learning to draw, had a beneficial effect on the mind. Both the study and practice of drawing challenged the viewer not only to appreciate fundamental principles of design but also to enter into the creative process of the artist. Given these perceived educational benefits, civic-minded Baltimoreans were driven to collect and also to make their holdings accessible to the public. Reinforcing her argument that these collections were formed with public education in mind, Snay points to the parallels between the Baltimore holdings and the emerging canon of modern art in France.

Following Snay’s excellent contextual essay, Johnston and Fisher introduce the personalities responsible for Baltimore’s nineteenth-century French drawings collections and provide histories of their collecting activities. This is familiar territory for Johnston, Associate Director and Senior Curator of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Art at the WAM, and author of William and Henry Walters, the Reticent Collectors (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). In his essay, “A Family Collection: William and Henry Walters’ French Drawings,” Johnston focuses primarily on William Walters’ collecting activities, since he acquired the bulk of the nineteenth-century French drawings in the Walters collection. Johnston characterizes William Walters’ taste in drawings as tied closely to fashionable trends, with a preference for highly finished sheets, often didactic in subject. Of particular interest, and not emphasized in his earlier study, is Johnston’s discussion of Walters’ evolution as a drawings collector, from the purchase of small drawings that were bound in albums for private delectation to his post–Civil War preference for more significant, highly finished drawings, which were displayed in frames. Johnston concludes his essay with an examination of son Henry’s role in augmenting his father’s drawings collection and his responsibility for founding the Walters Art Gallery.

Johnston’s essay is followed by a brief essay titled “Albums of Nineteenth-Century Drawings and Watercolors at the Walter’s Art Museum,” in which Snay provides an overview of methods for storing and presenting drawings utilized by collectors from the sixteenth into the nineteenth century. Although today we are accustomed to viewing drawings in frames, she notes that well into the nineteenth century most collectors mounted their drawings and kept them in either portfolios or albums. Evidence suggests that a great deal of thought and care were devoted to the arrangement of drawings in albums; but with so few intact albums extant, the underlying rationale is not easy to determine. Although they have been disassembled for conservation reasons, the WAM has thirteen albums of drawings owned by William Walters, for several of which the original order was recorded. In conjunction with Snay’s essay, Johnston supplies a list of these albums with a description of their bindings and contents.

In his essay “Collecting Nineteenth-Century French Drawings in a Twentieth-Century Museum,” Fisher focuses on the contributions to the BMA of the collectors Charles James Madison Eaton, George Lucas, and the Cone sisters, Claribel and Etta. In contrast to the Walters drawings, the BMA’s holdings exhibit a greater variety of styles and techniques, resulting from the different aesthetic leanings of these collectors. For example, the BMA’s collection includes the works of more avant-garde artists than does the Walters collection, as well as a larger number of sketches and preparatory studies. In an earlier essay, “Dr. Claribel and Miss Etta Cone: A Collection of Modern Art for Baltimore” (in Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, ed., Before Peggy Guggenheim: American Women Art Collectors [Venice: Marsilio, 2001], 107–29), Fisher discussed the important contributions of the Cone sisters to Baltimore’s cultural heritage, but here he focuses on their drawings acquisitions and the motivations behind their purchases. Given their well-known interest in Matisse and other early twentieth-century artists, Fisher argues that the sisters purchased nineteenth-century drawings by artists like Ingres and Degas for the modernist tendencies their works reveal. Fisher brings the history of the BMA’s drawings collection up to the present with a discussion of curators and their acquisitions. He pays special tribute to Adelyn Breeskin, the first Curator of Prints and Drawings at the BMA, and her remarkable curatorial vision.

The final essay, Schenck’s “Crayon, Paper, and Paint: An Examination of Nineteenth-Century Drawing Materials,” is a fascinating description of the myriad materials available to French artists in the nineteenth century and how they were employed. Of particular interest is her commentary on new materials produced in response to the changing aesthetics and artistic practices of the century. For example, the desire to record effects of light and atmosphere led to the availability of easily portable paper tablets and watercolor boxes, as well as collapsible stools and sketching umbrellas. Moreover, the paper industry boomed with the manufacture of machine-made papers in a wide assortment of sizes, weights, and textures to answer the demands of different drawing media and to accommodate the growing interest in more spontaneous effects. Especially useful for the non-specialist, Schenck also provides a glossary for materials and techniques.

The catalogue includes sixty-three works from the BMA and forty-three from the WAM, the entries for which are arranged alphabetically by artist. While this denies the possibility of visualizing the comprehensive nature of the holdings, described by the authors as an overview of the major stylistic currents and artistic personalities of the nineteenth century, the selections substantiate the claims for variety in drawing media, subject matter, and type or function of drawing, which offer an intimate glimpse into the diverse artistic practices and aesthetic preferences of the century. The entries are beautifully illustrated with color reproductions. In many cases, color details are included as well, which allow the reader to closely examine an artist’s working methods and materials. Most of the works are little known to the public. Nine works had not been exhibited or published before this exhibition and catalogue, and over half have been seen or published five or fewer times.

As with the essays, an impressive level of research and writing has been achieved throughout the catalogue entries, which are accessible to the non-specialist and valuable to the scholar. For each artist represented, biographical information is provided, and the works are situated within the artist’s oeuvre. As individual works themselves demand, further attention is devoted to iconography, or to the work as a reflection of a particular collector’s taste, or to technical matters. The entries offer new provenance and exhibition information as well.

It should be noted that the drawings included in the catalogue were selected to represent the strengths and breadth of the nineteenth-century French drawings at the BMA and the WAM but are only a small portion of their entire collections. More than nine hundred nineteenth-century French drawings can be accessed online in a new searchable database launched at the time of the exhibition and this publication. The online catalogue (www.frenchdrawings.org) allows users to search by artist, title, provenance, subject, and date, and provides the opportunity for storage of the user’s finds in a virtual gallery.