The Prints and Drawings Collection
ABOUT THE COLLECTION
The AGO's Prints and Drawings collection comprises more than 20,000 prints, drawings, and watercolours, housing works on paper from the 1400s to the present day. The Prints and Drawings collection intersects with many of the AGO’s collecting areas, including European, Canadian, Inuit, Modern, Contemporary, and Photography.
The collection is grounded in European prints, drawings, watercolours and pastels, and the main strengths of the AGO's holdings are Italian (1500s–1700s), French (1600s-1800s) and British (1700s-1900s). The collection also includes small but distinct holdings from the Dutch and German schools.
Highlights include drawings by Michelangelo, François Boucher, John Constable, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Thomas Gainsborough, Paul Gauguin, Vasily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, Egon Schiele and Vincent van Gogh. Large holdings of Canadian works on paper include those of Greg Curnoe, Betty Goodwin, David Milne, Michael Snow, Walter Trier, F.H. Varley and David Blackwood.
The collection also contains French and English Caricatures, European and American posters, Cologne Dada and large groups of prints by Rembrandt, Francisco Goya, James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, James Tissot, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, James McNeill Whistler, Ernst Barlach, Käthe Kollwitz, Stanley Spencer, Henry Moore, and Robert Motherwell.
Because only a small percentage of the Gallery’s vast collection of prints and drawings can be on view at any one time, works from the permanent collection are available for study in the Marvin Gelber Print and Drawing Study Centre by appointment and during drop-in hours on Wednesday afternoons. The Study Centre makes accessible the collection of prints, drawings and watercolours, as well as the large collection of photographs.
