The Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs came into being as the result of important gifts of large collections of prints and drawings in the 1920s. Works of art on paper are known to have been in the Museum’s collection at least by 1902, when Charles E. Dana, a watercolorist, was honorary curator of prints, manuscripts, bookplates, and historic seals. The arrival of the Charles M. Lea Collection of some 4,000 Old Master prints and drawings brought about the establishment of a department of prints in 1928; between 1928 and 1930 Boies Penrose, a local collector, was honorary curator, working with an assistant, Eleanor Pearson.

During the 1930s major gifts included the William S. Pilling Collection of about 2,500 Old Master European prints; drawings by Thomas Eakins and John Singer Sargent, acquired respectively from the artists’ families; and drawings and prints by Auguste Rodin, which came as part of the Jules E. Mastbaum Collection.

In 1940, Carl Zigrosser was appointed the Museum’s first Curator of Prints and Drawings, and collecting proceeded with greater method. Zigrosser sought to model the department upon the great encyclopedic print cabinets of Europe, as well as those of Boston and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, a structure it maintains to this day. Zigrosser built great strengths in the area of his expertise: American and European prints of the early 20th century as well as Mexican prints and drawings. During his tenure the department’s collections benefited from the important prints, drawings, and illustrated books that came with the collections of Louise and Walter Arensberg (1950), A.E. Gallatin (1952), and Louis E. Stern (1963). Zigrosser was also responsible for the beginning of the photography collection, with the acquisition of 69 photographs by Alfred Stieglitz from the estate in 1949, as well as for the initiation of the Ars Medica Collection through a grant from Smith, Kline, and French in 1949; in subsequent decades, the collection was expanded significantly through many gifts from William H. Helfand.

Kneeland McNulty, who had been Zigrosser’s assistant since 1951, became Curator Prints and Drawings when Zigrosser retired in 1964. McNulty’s expertise in Japanese prints brought important holdings of Yokahama prints (1968); Osaka prints (1969); and 299 color triptychs of the Russo-Japanese War (1976). In 1968, the Alfred Stieglitz Center for Photography was established with the support of Dorothy Norman, and Michael E. Hoffman was appointed advisor. A grant from the Hunt Manufacturing Co. in 1979 established a fund for the acquisition of adventurous and cutting-edge contemporary art on paper, which continued until 2001. When McNulty retired in 1980, the department was administered by Acting Curators Ellen S. Jacobowitz and Ann Percy. During that time, the Philip and Muriel Berman Gift of 2,500 European drawings and 42,000 European prints were acquired in 1984 and 1985, respectively, from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, in a single stroke transforming the department’s holdings of old master prints and drawings.

Innis Howe Shoemaker became Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs in 1986. Between 1987 and 2003, the prints in the Berman Gift were catalogued in depth on a computer database; the department’s two-year curatorial fellowship program, initially funded in 1979 by the National Endowment for the Arts, has provided training for a generation of future curators in the graphic arts. In 2001 the Julien Levy Collection of some 2,500 photographs was acquired by a gift of the artist’s widow and through the generosity of Lynne and Harold Honickman. The department moved its collection, study room, office, paper conservation laboratory, and the Julien Levy Gallery for photographs in 2007 to spacious, state-of-the art facilities in the Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building, bringing together the collection of more than 150,000 works on paper in a single location and providing greatly improved access to the collections in light-filled spaces for students and scholars. The Abigail Rebecca Cohen Study Room in the Perelman Building is open by appointment Tuesdays through Fridays, and welcomes more than 1,000 visitors annually.