Images & Texts

PRESS INFORMATION

Passion for Pictures: Netherlandish Drawings of the Eighteenth Century

Extended until 24 May 2021

The Städel Museum has in its possession nearly 600 Netherlandish drawings of the eighteenth century – and thus one of the most extensive collections of its kind outside the Netherlands and Belgium. From 1 October 2020 to 24 May 2021, the museum will devote an exhibition solely to these works. The show will feature 81 representative drawings by artists of whom many, though little known today, were quite successful in their time. The selection mirrors the structure and artistic quality of the holdings as well as the wide range of subjects they cover. Frequently executed as finished artworks on a par with painting, often in colour, the drawings catered to the enlightened eighteenth-century citizens’ passion for pictures, as well as to their thirst for dialogue and information. Art admirers cultivated the pastime of gathering to contemplate and converse about the works.

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The Städel Museum has now made more than 22,000 works in its Digital Collection available for free downloading under the Creative Commons licence CC BY-SA 4.0. This licence enables anyone interested in art to reproduce and share the images of artworks in the public domain, as well as to use and process them for any purpose, provided the Städel Museum is identified in a credit line. Popular works in the Städel collection, for example Sandro Botticelli’s Idealized Portrait of a Lady (Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci as a Nymph) (ca. 1480), Franz Marc’s Dog Lying in the Snow (ca. 1911), Paula Modersohn-Becker’s Man Lying beneath a Blossoming Tree (1903), Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait Leaning on a Stone Wall (1639), Johannes Vermeer’s The Geographer (1669) and many more are thus available for free downloading by way of the Digital Collection. Entirely in keeping with the wishes of the museum’s founder, the aim of this new service is to make the Städel collection available to the public and further the public enjoyment of common cultural assets.

Download the complete press release here.

PRESS RELEASE

Städel’s Legacy: Master Drawings from the Founder’s Collection
13 MAY TO 16 AUGUST 2020
Exhibition Hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings

With the bequest of his private art collection, the businessman and banker Johann Friedrich Städel (1728–1816) founded a public art museum of international stature, accessible to all – the Städel Museum. The collector left behind an art treasure encompassing not only paintings and prints but also more than 4,600 drawings. For a long time, it was not possible to determine which of the drawings in the museum’s present-day holdings were originally in his collection. At the time of the bequest, no complete inventory was compiled. Furthermore, in the course the collection’s reorganization in the 1860s, many drawings were sorted out and sold. For the first time, the Städel Museum has now succeeded in reconstructing the founder’s drawing collection to a large extent, and identifying the roughly 3,000 works still in the collection today. From 13 May to 16 August 2020, the Städel Museum is presenting a selection of 95 master drawings providing a representative impression of the character, organization and artistic significance of the former drawing collection of Johann Friedrich Städel. Following the founder’s tradition, the outstanding works by Raphael, Correggio and Primaticcio, Watteau, Boucher and Fragonard, Dürer, Roos and Reinhart, Goltzius, Rembrandt, De Wit and many others are here arranged according to “European schools”. They are moreover discussed in detail in an accompanying catalogue. A portion of these drawings are already known among scholars; others are here being published for the first time.

Curator: Joachim Jacoby
With support from: Stiftung Gabriele Busch-Hauck, Wolfgang Ratjen Stiftung, Tavolozza Foundation, Georg und Franziska Speyer’sche Hochschulstiftung

Download the complete press release here.