The Informal View

A great painter's monument rests in his paintings, but he is often at his most appealing in his drawings. Last week the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened the first exhibition of 128 drawings from the collection of retired Manhattan Banker Walter C. Baker. The pictures straddle the centuries, fix on no style or school. But each in its way adds some intimate clue to how the mind of the artist works.

Probably the first man to collect drawings in a systematic way, says the Metropolitan's assistant curator of European paintings, Claus Virch, was Giorgio Vasari (The Lives of the Painters). But the artists of Vasari's time had a special affection for their less ambitious creations. Young students pored over them to study design. Raphael and Duerer exchanged drawings as a mark of esteem, and Michelangelo would on occasion make a drawing for someone he was particularly fond of. Noble and royal patrons soon caught the fever. Charles I of England was such an avid collector of paintings and drawings that Rubens called him "the most art-loving prince in Europe.''

In the 1800's the collector was often a fashionable portraitist like Sir Thomas Lawrence, who had 100 Duerers, 121 Rembrandts, 138 Michelangelos and 199 Raphaels by the time he died. Today such a private collection would be impossible. Most of the world's old master-drawings have found their permanent home in the great museums, and the few that do appear on the open market command prices of anywhere up to $30,000 for a Rembrandt or a Fragonard. Such a modern collector as Walter Baker must not only have taste but also unending patience: master-drawings no longer come in great lots, but for the most part must be picked up one by one and year by year.

The result is a variety that gives the Baker show a special flavor. The artists, usually shown at their most informal, suddenly seem a loquacious lot anxious not only to charm but to reveal all their secrets--how they built a composition, the kind of scene that would make them whip out a sketch pad, all the study and struggle that went into their greatest paintings. Rubens experiments by placing the handsome face of youth next to the mischievous face of an old satyr. Giovanni Battista Tiepolo catches a Bearded Oriental in a Long Coat hustling down a street, and his admirer, Jean Fragonard, of a generation later, immortalizes a brooding Sultan sprawled in a chair. The show runs from Florentine High Renaissance to 20th century U.S., but one of the rarest of the drawings is Fra Bartolommeo's Adoration of the Magi. The infant Christ is but a tiny and sketchy figure in the scene, but the eye leaps to him instantly and hesitates to leave. Three of England's greatest collectors--Earl Spencer, Sir Thomas Lawrence and Sir John Charles Robinson--all owned the Adoration at one time or another, and all thought that it had been done by Raphael.

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