This exhibition highlights the variety of drawings from the Johnson Museum’s permanent collection by European artists from the 19th to the mid-20th century, including landscape and cityscape, portraiture, allegory, abstract, and whimsical sketches.

Museums collect such works for their beauty, their potential as teaching tools, to demonstrate how they relate to the larger body of an artist’s genre, and what they can tell us about the world as a whole, culturally, historically, and artistically. Drawing the Line explores work by some of the best-known artists of this medium: 19th-century masters Thomas Rowlandson, Richard Parkes Bonington, Eugène Delacroix, Edward Burne-Jones, Émile Schuffenecker, and the expatriates John Singer Sargent and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, with twentieth-century examples by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Egon Schiele, and others.

This exhibition was curated by Nancy E. Green, the Gale and Ira Drukier Curator of European and American Art, Prints & Drawings, 1800–1945, at the Johnson Museum, and is supported in part by the Donald and Maria Cox Exhibition Endowment.