A collector’s guide to Old Master drawings

Writing on the importance of drawing, Tintoretto once proclaimed: ‘Beautiful colours can be bought in the shops on the Rialto, but good drawing can only be bought from the casket of the artist’s talent with patient study and nights without sleep.’

In the early modern period, aspiring artists were expected to spend their formative years practising drawing from the live model. French and Italian artists travelled to Rome to copy the Old Masters and the ancients, while Dutch artists also headed to Italy, but mainly for the landscape and the incomparable light.

Draughtsmanship was the basis of much creative production, whether the artist worked in clay, paint or metal. It’s often said that drawing is the thought of the artist: the painting on the wall is the finished article, but to arrive at this final state, the artist usually has to draw.

Old Master drawings are often intricately linked with the history of the country in which they were produced: in the 17th century, for example, the Netherlands was an iconoclastic, Protestant country, so there were almost no commissions for religious paintings — and, with no real aristocracy, monarch or court, most art was bought privately. Drawings of landscapes or genre scenes were often viewed not as sketches, but as finished works of art. Most of these drawn works tended to feature the artist’s signature.

Italian drawings, by contrast, show the influence of the church, which played a huge role in artistic patronage. Important ecclesiastical commissions required extensive preparation, and a significant number of Old Master drawings from Italy are studies of figures and compositional sketches for larger works.

The same is often true of French drawings, although in the 17th century the discipline of French classicism meant that drawings were generally less Baroque than their Italian counterparts, which conveyed a greater sense of movement.

Typically, 16th- and 17th-century artists would begin a larger work by quickly sketching their intended composition in pen and ink, often over unobtrusive indications in black chalk. Drawings made with a rapidly wielded pen were ideal for exploring an initial idea.

Artists used chalk to depict individual figures more carefully and with greater precision, and to study the fall of light and shadow. Blue paper worked well with black, white or red chalk — or sometimes all three.

Once these initial sketches had been made, the artist would move on to the modello, a finished study close to the final composition, and this would often be submitted to a patron for approval. These were sometimes squared, allowing a composition to be transferred more easily to canvas — or, in the case of a fresco, to the wall.

In the field of Italian drawing, most collectors look for depictions of the figure, while for Dutch drawings, landscapes tend to be most popular — though Rembrandt’s figure drawings, for instance, are also highly sought-after. When looking at a drawing, quality is of paramount importance.

A great drawing, even one by a less well-known artist, can attract the attention of collectors and achieve an impressive price. In 2011, Christie’s sold a drawing of a cavalier by Pieter van Bloemen, a Dutch artist of the 17th century. Its composition and execution gave it a special charm, and it sold for £253,250 on an estimate of only £3,000-5,000, the record for a van Bloemen until then being around £4,000.

Works that have been sold at Christie’s range in price from £500 to £29 million (for Rafael’s Head of a muse, sold in London in 2009). More recently, Christie’s sold a rare figure study by the Dutch artist Lucas van Leyden for £11,483,750 in 2018, and on 5 February 2026, Study for a foot of the Libyan Sibyl, a rediscovered drawing by Michelangelo, sold at Christie’s in New York for $27.2 million. One of only about 10 drawings by the Renaissance master in private hands, it is among 50 known studies relating to the Sistine Chapel.

Yet more than 90 per cent of drawings have a market value of less than £10,000, and it is possible to find very good drawings by well-known artists for a few thousand pounds. A 17th-century study of a group of soldiers by Salvator Rosa, for instance, offered with an estimate of €3,000-5,000, is a brilliantly expressive work. In a few vigorous strokes of the pen, the Neapolitan painter captures the attitudes and gestures of four figures, at least two of whom appear to be engaged in a lively discussion.

The drawing departments of most museums are open to the public, not reserved for scholars. Visiting museum collections gives you the opportunity to see drawings unframed, which is the best way to approach them. The far reaches of the British Museum collection can be explored if you make a request in advance. The same applies to many European and American museums.

In the UK, there are excellent collections of drawings at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum and Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum. In Europe, visit the Louvre in Paris, the Uffizi in Florence and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which has an especially beautiful collection of Dutch drawings. The United States has the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.

Christie’s pre-sale auction viewings offer anyone the opportunity to see the works. There is something very immediate about a drawing, and you only get a sense of its physicality when you study the work close-up.

The confident attribution of the signatures on a Caspar David Friedrich drawing offered in 2018, A Gothic brick building and two studies of trees, saw it sell for £212,500, more than double its high estimate.

The value of a drawing can decrease tenfold if its condition is poor. Exposure to sunlight leads to fading and discolouration of the paper, and the ink tends to sink into the paper and damage it. This used to mean a collector could not always hang drawings on his or her walls. But today there are ways to avoid damage from the light, such as the use of UV-resistant glass.

Drawings can also suffer from insects, such as silverfish, that eat the paper. Depending on the medium, humidity can be a problem. Storage is also an issue: drawings can be found folded, or with smudged portions, having been left unframed and unprotected.

However, most drawings have survived the test of time surprisingly well. Christie’s has sold some extraordinarily well-preserved works, such as Raphael’s Head of a muse. This direct study, or cartoon, for The Parnassus, one of the artist’s great frescoes in the Vatican, would be a highlight of any collection. By the time it was sold in 2009, some 500 years after it was made, it had passed through great collections such as those of William II, Prince of Orange, and Sir Joshua Reynolds. Its condition suggested that it had always been cherished.

Christie’s Old Masters sales are on view in Paris, 20-25 March 2026, alongside La bibliothèque poétique de Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller, 4e partie