Drawings That Look Like Prints

Heindrick Goltzius, A Right Hand, pen and ink. Left: Teyler's Museum, Haarlem, 1588. Right: Private collection, about 1588 

Drawings and prints tend to be conjoined in museum departments. Most people know that drawings are unique products of the artist's hand and can serve as preparatory studies for mass-produced woodcuts, engravings, etchings, or lithographs. A Getty loan show co-organized with the Art Institute of Chicago, "Lines of Connection: Drawing and Printmaking," demonstrates that the relationship between the media is not so pat. For one thing, drawings sometimes come after the related prints. 

Novice art students were encouraged to copy Old Master prints, an easier exercise than drawing from a sculpture or live model. Centuries ago, Lucas van Leyden's engraved series were already so rare and expensive that collectors lacking a particular print would commission an artist to make a hand-drawn copy of the missing image. The fungible drawing would be displayed in lieu of the costly multiple.

Hendrick Goltzius, A Right Hand, 1588. Teylers Museum, Haarlem

That brings us to an engaging subset of the show: drawings created as trompe l'oeil replicas of prints. Unlike a painting, a drawing hardly be hardly be confused for the "real thing" unless the real thing is a print. Creating a drawing that could be confused as a print was thus an ultimate test of draughtsmanship.

Famed as a virtuoso engraver, Hendrick Goltzius drew an iconic picture of his injured right hand, burned in a fire. The brush-and-ink drawing is made in the style of an engraving, something much more challenging than it may sound to someone who's never tried it. Rarely lent, the 1588 drawing (now in the Teylers Museum, Haarlem) is the show's centerpiece. Incredibly, it's accompanied by a near identical drawing, also autograph, from a private collection. The Teylers drawing alone has the inscription.

Maurice Roger, Trompe L'oeil of a Tabletop with Dürer Prints and Printed Matter, pen and ink, opaque watercolor, and varnish, about 1740–60. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The otherwise obscure 18th-century artist Maurice Roger did a Trompe L'oeil of a Tabletop with Dürer Prints and Printed Matter. Over 36 inches across, it's an amazing production mimicking Dürer prints (some reversed) and pages from books.

Philipp Jacob Gütl and Caspar von Muralt, Allegorical Scene with the Infant Hercules Killing a Snake, pen and ink, 1747. Getty Research Institute

A book on view is a hand-drawn hoax. Both the text and the illustrations were drawn in pen and ink (by two artists) to mimic printed text and engravings in a festival book marking a royal birth. 

"Lines of Connection" occupies all four drawing galleries in the West Pavilion, plus a space in the North Pavilion, across from manuscripts. The latter part, easy to miss, has a group of large-scale, magisterial drawings and prints by Toba Khedoori.

"Lines of Connection: Drawing and Printmaking" is at the Getty Center through Sep. 14, 2025. 

Toba Khedoori, Untitled (grass) (oil, graphite, and wax on paper), 2019–20. Private collection, Switzerland