Literature

The acquisitions register of the Graphische Sammlung records in 1925 an astonishing exchange with Friedrich Otto Pestalozzi (1846-1940), an ironmonger, cantonal great councillor and temporary president of the Zurich Art Society. Over 300 drawings were proposed in exchange for a few doublets of copper engravings by Hans Sebald Beham. The convolute comprised Italian, French, German and Dutch sheets of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Amongst them were also some from the collection of the Zurich scholar Johann Caspar Lavater (1741-1801) with their characteristic mounts. From today’s point of view this constitutes less an exchange than a generous gift from Pestalozzi.

In the early years of the Graphische Sammlung, its founders did not view the collecting of Old Master drawings as one of the main interests. Nevertheless a sizable holding in the field of Swiss drawings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was formed by the purchase of the collection of Johann Jakob Bühlmann and the gift of Heinrich Schulthess-von Meiss. This was then enlarged in 1904 when the Gottfried Keller Stiftung deposited important sheets from the Lucerne collection Meyer-am Rhyn. The curators Rudolf Bernoulli and Erwin Gradmann added several highlights to the collection by means of occasional, targeted purchases at auction or from existing collections. Amongst these are drawings by Domenico Campagnola, Palma Giovane, Guercino and Jacques Callot. The history of the attribution of drawings to an artist, subject to frequent changes, has not spared some of these sheets. There have been works which have had their earlier attributions rejected, such as a landscape bought as being by Guercino, now accepted to be by the well-known Guercino faker of the second half of the eighteenth century. A drawing formerly believed to be a chalk drawing by Federico Barocci is now known to be a preparatory study for a painting by Dionisio Calvaert to be found in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna. An important recent discovery is the preparatory drawing on vellum for a copper engraving showing a fowling by Etienne Delaune. This drawing, part of the extensive collection of Helvetica bequeathed to the Graphische Sammlung in 1956 by Victor Näf, was until now considered as being by Jost Amann and kept with the Swiss drawings.

Today the collection of drawings, most of which remains unpublished to this day, spans a considerable period: from the early sheets of the fifteenth century, such as the pen drawing by Lux Zeiner to a group of architectural and theatre scenes from the circle of the Galli Bibiena family. There is a collection of Swiss drawings and preparatory drawings for stained glass, including important works by Urs Graf, Tobias Stimmer and also Jos and Christoph Murer; alongside these the Italian drawings certainly form a heterogeneous group of works, but one which is none the less interesting for this. The largest coherent convolute is composed of a series, in 18 parts, of chalk drawings on blue paper by François Verdier, a pupil of Le Brun.