Leafing through the lushly illustrated pages of the National Gallery of Canada’s book of highlights from its works-on-paper collection, any art lover with a taste for tradition might sigh with contentment. Pause to admire Roman ruins rendered in black ink by Giovanni Paolo Panini, a refined row of trees in graphite by Vilhelm Hammershøi, a pastel of a woman fixing her hair by Camille Pissarro. The cumulative effect is of timelessness.
Turn from the pictures to the text, though, and a careful reader is brought back to the moment. The publication of Gathered Leaves: Discoveries from the Drawings Vault, with a parallel exhibition in Ottawa, was originally planned to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the museum’s drawings collection in 2021, supported by a grant from the Getty Foundation. That milestone was missed, writes Sonia Del Re, the senior curator of prints and drawings, because of “institutional hurdles and ensuing delays.”
Del Re...
John Geddes previously worked as the Ottawa bureau chief for Maclean’s.
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