NEW YORK, NY.- The upcoming display of drawings, prints, and illustrated books in the Johnson Galleries will offer a rich presentation of artists' portraits and self-portraits, both drawings and prints, dating from the early sixteenth to the early twentieth century. Among the highlights to be included are: a self-portrait by the Northern Renaissance master Simon Bening, showing the artist in his light-filled studio, interrupting work on a manuscript page pinned to his desk as he removes his eyeglasses to peer at the viewer; Rembrandt's etched self-portrait, in which he dons the elegant attire and refined, self-possessed attitude of a Renaissance courtier; and Seurat's masterful and monumental study, rendered with the silken, dark tonality of his favorite graphic medium, Conté crayon, of his friend and fellow painter Aman-Jean, absorbed in his artistic labor.

Innovative currents in early sixteenth-century Netherlandish art—a reflection of influences absorbed from Italian and German art of the time—will be the subject of another section of the exhibition, which will feature works by or after Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Jan Gossart, and drawings and prints made in Rome by Maarten van Heemskerck and other artists from the Netherlands active in the mid-sixteenth century. Also on view will be three recently acquired large landscape drawings by early nineteenth-century German and Swiss artists, including Caspar David Friedrich. Finally, a selection of prints and drawings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries depicting images of women by artists such as Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, Willem de Kooning, and Sigmar Polke will be exhibted, together with a 2009 portfolio of nine woodcuts by the German artist Christiane Baumgartner.

Drawings and Prints: Selections from the Permanent Collection is on view from January 3, 2011–March 27, 2011 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.