Drawing Knowledge

Artists—painters, sculptors, printmakers, architects—employed drawing as an integral part of their practice. They used drawing to explore and convey their ideas, to study and document their surroundings, and to create independent works of art.

The J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection of drawings began with the purchase of a single sheet in 1981: a study of a nude woman with a snake wrapped around her legs by the Dutch seventeenth-century artist Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669). Since then, the collection has grown to over 900 pieces comprising Western European drawings produced between the fifteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

The primary means to access the drawings in the Getty's collection is through the institution's website. Currently, the drawings collection lacks the necessary metadata to search effectively. For example, if you were to search for the term "flower", you would be unable to find these beautiful peonies by Martin Schongauer (c.1450/3 - 1491):

Or, if you were interested in finding all of the Getty's drawings that feature cats, this composition showing a chunky cat on a windowsill would not be included in your search results:

Through this project, we invite you to engage with the Getty Museum's extraordinary drawings collection and to share your knowledge and ideas about the pieces.

The data collected for this project will be reviewed by a team of subject specialists who will use this information to improve the search function on the Getty website, which will make the collection more accessible to online users.

Additionally, your feedback will also help us reassess the interpretation of drawings in our collection. Many objects entered the Getty with traditional titles and entrenched ideas about their subjects, but these are not always correct. Recently, we learned that a man traditionally thought to be Indian was in fact a man of European descent, who was employed by the Ecole des Beaux-arts (the preeminent art academy in Paris, France) to pose for elderly biblical figures.

For these reasons we are asking for your help. The information you provide will make our collection search more user-friendly and perhaps lead the way to new discoveries and interpretations.