"Master Drawings…"

A show like this—its full title being “Master Drawings from the Yale University Art Gallery”—renders the star rating merely ornamental. As one of the top university museums in the country, Yale owns more than 8,000 drawings; for this traveling exhibit, 84 were culled from its top-drawer, deeply Eurocentric batch of works on paper. We would expect to see fine examples of draftsmanship from the Renaissance to the mid-19th century, and we do. Ink-wash studies abound by such greats as Italian painter Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591–1666), known as Guercino; French rococo artist Jean-Antoine Watteau; and a couple generations of Tiepolos.

The work of Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (1727–1804), who worked in series, is represented here with the brown ink Punchinello Feeding the Peacocks (c. 1800). Domenico Tiepolo, who drew more than 300 biblical scenes, also had a thing for the beak-nosed jokester of the Commedia dell’arte. He made 104 drawings of the scoundrel going about his life. The Punchinello drawings remained intact until an auction in 1920 scattered them off into private and museum collections. Last year, one of them—of Punchinello riding a camel—sold at an auction for about $641,000, setting a record for a Tiepolo drawing. To complement this show, the museum displays six drawings from its Richard Gray Collection. When you’ve had your fill of the Old Masters, take in the 20th century with work by Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró.