Prints, drawings, watercolors, collages, gouaches, ephemera, photographs

With holdings of more than 150,000 works of art on paper, the Museum’s Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs is one of the largest public collections of such works in the United States. Especially distinguished in the area of European old master prints from the 16th to 18th centuries, this collection was greatly enhanced with the 1985 acquisition of more than 42,000 prints, by purchase and exchange, from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Also of note are the holdings of Mexican and Japanese prints; American prints from the 1930s and 1940s; and the Ars Medica Collection--2,500 works on paper related to the history of medicine that is the only one of its kind in any museum. The department also boasts an outstanding array of ephemeral material related to Marcel Duchamp, while important works by artists such as Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, and Pablo Picasso are among its 12,000 drawings. The Museum’s celebrated photography holdings include an important group of images by Alfred Stieglitz, received from the artist’s own collection; more than 2,500 photographs in the Julien Levy Collection; and The Paul Strand Collection, numbering more than 4,000 images from every major series photographed by this American master.

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