The collection of prints and drawings at the National Gallery contains
about fifty thousand examples from the fifteenth century to the present
time. Included are drawings by Dürer, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Blake, as
well as a wide range of prints by the major graphic artists of the
Western World. The National Gallery’s collection incorporates an
extremely fine selection of early Northern woodcuts and engravings and
one of the most important groups of eighteenth-century French prints,
drawings, and book illustrations outside of France. There is also an
excellent group of early manuscript illuminations.
Visitors may examine prints and drawings not on exhibition by
appointment with a curator in the Department of Graphic Arts.