Drawings and Prints

Drawings and Prints

Department of Drawings and Prints

To enter into the Department of Drawings and Prints is to discover the treasure of the Louvre. I had saved the best visit for last. Anyone can make an appointment to come to this majestic room and consult a drawing, but a selection naturally occurs. The curator had brought out for me some of the most precious pieces from various schools—Dürer, Raphaël and Michelangelo, Le Brun and Poussin, Watteau and Fragonard—each from the richest collections, including Jabach’s and Mariette’s, which entered the Louvre in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. All these drawings rest in red-marked boxes, the ones the firemen are trained to rush for in case of emergency. Some of the Watteaus suffered from having been carelessly exposed too long to the light of the Galerie d’Apollon during the nineteenth century; but not this drawing, “Six head studies of a woman, and two of a young boy,” which once belonged to the wondrous collection of the Comtesse de Béhague, alongside early Italian and Flemish masters and drapery studies by Leonardo da Vinci (RF 51760). This sheet was donated to the museum by the Société des Amis du Louvre in 1997. Before leaving, I asked to see Baudelaire’s drawings, including three self-portraits and a portrait of Jeanne Duval. Their date assigns them to the Musée d’Orsay, whose collection is also held here. That’s how I spent a dream morning.