PRINCETON, NJ.- More than 100 rarely seen treasures from the Ashmolean Museum’s world renowned collection of drawing and watercolors, dating from the 17th to the 20th centuries, are on view this summer at the Princeton University Art Museum. Showcasing celebrated artists such as William Blake, Thomas Gainsborough, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, J.M.W. Turner, John Everett Millais, Aubrey Beardsley and David Hockney, Great British Drawings from the Ashmolean Museum charts the compelling history of British art, history and culture through the lens of drawing – the most intimate and spontaneous expression of the creative process. Through portraits, landscapes, still-lifes, narrative scenes and book illustrations, the exhibition provides a rich and deeply varied survey of the drawing tradition in Britain.

Great British Drawings, which premiered in Oxford in 2015, is on view from July 1 through Sept. 17, 2017, at the Princeton University Art Museum, the exclusive international venue. It is the first comprehensive exhibition drawn from the Ashmolean Museum’s collection of British drawings, which was initiated in 1689 and now numbers more than 10,000 works.

The exhibition is curated by Colin Harrison, senior curator of European art at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, and coordinated by Laura Giles, Heather and Paul G. Haaga Jr., Class of 1970, curator of prints and drawings at the Princeton University Art Museum.

“This exhibition represents the next in a series of collaborations with our peer museum at Oxford, with which Princeton has a special relationship,” said James Steward, Nancy A. Nasher–David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, Director. “To engage with this superlative collection of three centuries of the greatest British drawings and watercolors is to revel in the connections between hand and mind, likeness and abstraction, art and history.”

The exhibition is organized in four broadly chronological and thematic sections: “Likeness and Vision 1650-1830” sets the stage with realistic portraits, imaginary landscapes and visionary scenes by George Romney, Thomas Gainsborough, Henry Fuseli and William Blake, among others; “Travel and Topography: the Golden Age of Watercolor Landscapes from 1750 to 1850” tracks the extraordinary evolution of watercolor from a “tinted drawing” towards an expressive medium rivalling oil paint, as conveyed in masterpieces by J.M.W. Turner and contemporaries such as Thomas Girtin and John Sell Cotman; “Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites: Observation and Imagination” focuses on the Victorian era and features a stunning selection of works by the Pre-Raphaelite artists (of which the Ashmolean has one of the world’s best arrays); and “The Modernist Century” emphasizes the competing representational and abstract currents in 20th-century British art, culminating in contemporary drawings by David Hockney, Tom Phillips and Frank Auerbach.

Great British Drawings from the Ashmolean Museum has been organized by the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, in association with the Princeton University Art Museum.