British Museum Plan

Department of Prints and Drawings
The Department of Prints and Drawings holds the national collection of Western prints and drawings. It ranks as one of the largest and best print room collections in existence alongside the Albertina in Vienna, the Paris collections and the Hermitage. The holdings are easily accessible to the general public in the Study Room, unlike many such collections.^[74] The department also has its own exhibition gallery in Room 90, where the displays and exhibitions change several times a year.^[75]
Since its foundation in 1808, the prints and drawings collection has grown to international renown as one of the richest and most representative collections in the world. There are approximately 50,000 drawings and over two million prints.^[75] The collection of drawings covers the period from the 14th century to the present, and includes many works of the highest quality by the leading artists of the European schools. The collection of prints covers the tradition of fine printmaking from its beginnings in the 15th century up to the present, with near complete holdings of most of the great names before the 19th century. Key benefactors to the department have been Clayton Mordaunt Cracherode, Richard Payne Knight, John Malcolm, Campbell Dodgson, César Mange de Hauke and Tomás Harris.
There are groups of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, (including his only surviving full-scale cartoon), Dürer (a collection of 138 drawings is one of the finest in existence), Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt, Claude and Watteau, and largely complete collections of the works of all the great printmakers including Dürer (99 engravings, 6 etchings and most of his 346 woodcuts), Rembrandt and Goya. More than 30,000 British drawings and watercolours include important examples of work by Hogarth, Sandby, Turner, Girtin, Constable, Cotman, Cox, Gillray, Rowlandson and Cruikshank, as well as all the great Victorians. There are about a million British prints including more than 20,000 satires and outstanding collections of works by William Blake and Thomas Bewick.^{[citation needed]}. The great eleven volume Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum compiled between 1870 and 1954 is the definitive reference work for the study of British Satirical prints. Over 500,000 objects from the department are now on the online collection database, many with high-quality images.^[76] A 2011 donation of £1 million enabled the museum to acquire a complete set of Pablo Picasso's Vollard Suite.^[77]

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Rogier van der Weyden - Portrait of a Young Woman, c. 1440

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  Hieronymus Bosch - A comical barber scene, c. 1477-1516
  
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Sandro Botticelli - Allegory of Abundance, 1480-1485

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Leonardo da Vinci – The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John the Baptist (prep for 'The Burlington House Cartoon'), c. 1499–1500

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Michelangelo – Studies of a reclining male nude: Adam in the fresco 'The Creation of Man' on the vault of the Sistine Chapel, c. 1511

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Raphael – Study of Heads, Mother and Child, c. 1509-11

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Titian – Drowning of the Pharaoh's Host in the Red Sea, 1515–17

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Albrecht Dürer - Drawing of a walrus, 1521

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Hans Holbein the Younger - Portrait of Anne Boleyn, 1536

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Peter Paul Rubens - Drawing of a lioness, c. 1614-1615

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  Francisco de Zurbarán - Head of a monk, 1625–64
  
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Claude Lorrain - Drawing of mules, including one full-length, 1630-1640

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Rembrandt – The Lamentation at the Foot of the Cross, 1634–35

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Thomas Gainsborough - Drawing of a woman with a rose, 1763-1765

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JMW Turner - Watercolour of Newport Castle, 1796

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Isaac Cruikshank - 'The happy effects of that grand system of shutting ports against the English!!', 1808

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John Constable - London from Hampstead Heath in a Storm, (watercolour), 1831

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James McNeill Whistler - View of the Battersea side of Chelsea Reach, London, (lithograph), 1878

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Vincent Van Gogh - Man Digging in the Orchard (print), 1883