The Prints and Drawings Rooms

Prints and Drawings Rooms Holdings

The collections of works on paper held in the Prints and Drawings Rooms include:

The Turner Bequest

Soon after his death in 1851, the contents of Turner's studio became the property of the nation. This collection is known as the Turner Bequest. It includes over 8,000 drawings and watercolours and some 280 bound sketchbooks. Many items in the Bequest are unfinished works or preparatory studies. They provide a unique insight into the artist's working methods and document his travels throughout Britain and Europe.

The Oppé Collection

The Oppé Collection was formed by the distinguished scholar and collector Paul Oppé (1878–1957) during the first half of this century. After his death the collection remained in his family. It is one of the last major collections of British drawings and watercolours to have stayed in private hands and has long been regarded as being of national importance.

The collection comprises some 3,000 individual works. It consists mainly of watercolours but also includes drawings, oil sketches on paper, sketchbooks, albums and prints. The overwhelming bias of the collection is towards landscape, reflecting the important development of the British watercolour school during what has become known as its Golden Age from 1750 to 1850.

The greatest strength of the collection is in late eighteenth-century landscape drawings, many produced by artists working in Switzerland and Italy in the era of the Grand Tour, for example, Richard Wilson, Francis Towne, JR Cozens, John (Warwick) Smith, John Downman, William Marlow, William Pars, and other less well-known contemporaries.

The acquisition of the Oppé Collection was made possible by grants from the National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund and from the National Art Collections Fund. The cataloguing of the Oppé Collection has also been supported by the National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Historic British works on paper

Tate has a fine group of British School works on paper ranging from the early eighteenth century to the late nineteenth. Some of the highlights of this area of the Collection are watercolours by Thomas Girtin, David Cox, John Sell Cotman, and Peter De Wint; drawings by the Pre-Raphaelite artists Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti; prints and watercolours by William Blake and Samuel Palmer and the exquisite set of watercolour illustrations by Helen Beatrix Potter for her book The Tailor of Gloucester.

Twentieth-century and contemporary prints

Tate's collection of some 8,000 modern prints is constantly growing. It comprises works by a wide range of British and international artists including some original portfolios. The collection represents a broad range of print-making media, from etching, engraving, woodblock and lithography to monoprints, screenprints and computer aided prints.

Many of the works are from the Institute of Contemporary Prints Gift of 1975 and there are important examples from the Kelpra Studios, the Curwen Press, Universal limited Art Editions and other print studios. There is also a good selection by the Young British Artists including Damien Hirst and Gary Hume.

Among the strengths of the collection are works by the English and American Pop artists including Roy Lichtenstein and Richard Hamilton, also work by the American Abstract Expressionists including Barnett Newman and Robert Motherwell. There are a number of original portfolios by artists such as Peter Doig, Paula Rego, Anish Kapoor, Rachel Whiteread, Terry Winters and El Lissitzky. Other artists well represented include Frank Auerbach, Patrick Caulfield, Dame Elizabeth Frink, David Hockney, Brice Marden, Henry Moore and Sir Eduardo Paolozzi.