Raphael to Renoir: Master Drawings from the Collection of Jean Bonna
June 5 – September 6; National Gallery Complex, Edinburgh

Drawings can often seem to be the poor cousins to paintings, in the gallery world. Small and modestly framed, they find themselves hidden away in low-ceilinged, dimly-lit spaces appropriate to their scale and conservation needs, while their oil-based cousins shout for attention, bathed in glory and plenty of light.

That’s in danger of happening this summer, at the National Galleries on The Mound. Upstairs, a colourful collection of Spanish paintings will grab the headlines amongst the lofty pillars and skylights of the RSA building. Downstairs, 120 drawings from the collection of Jean Bonna might be less conspicuous, but they should not be missed.

Bonna, a successful Swiss banker, has been collecting drawings for 21 years, living with the works from day to day in the rooms of his own house. It’s not everyone who can enjoy an original Raphael or Van Gogh on their wall, and the exhibition, Raphael To Renoir, will offer the rest of us a chance to get close to these rarely seen works.

Bonna’s taste in art is fairly conservative, leading him to value grace and harmony above all else, whether in female nudes, landscapes or studies for holy paintings. Every work is figurative, the collection beginning in the Italian Renaissance and coming to a halt when things get abstract early in the 20th century.

The Italians and French are well represented, from Raphael to Canaletto and Claude Lorrain to Degas. Rembrandt is there, with a little outdoor sketch, and Gericault, with an erotic image unknown till 1993. Unlike those of public museums, it’s a collection built on personal preference, so Bonna’s indifference towards British artists, for example, leaves an obvious gap.

Drawings can perform numerous functions. They can, like several in the collection, stand alone as fully finished works of art. Hans Hoffmann’s sparky little wild boar piglet of 1578, each of its bristles finely brushed in, is a good example. At the other end of the scale, a drawing can exist purely as an artist’s hasty note to themselves, never meant for public consumption. Delacroix’s superquick watercolour sketch of people in local costume, made on his travels through Morocco, is clearly that.

“That’s about as sketchy as anything gets in the Bonna collection,” says Aidan Weston-Lewis, Chief Curator of Italian and Spanish Art at the National Galleries. “Relatively highly finished drawings seem to be [Bonna’s] penchant,” he continues, “rather than very sketchy, bravura, rapidly executed sketches.”

Most of the exhibition lies somewhere between the two extremes, including figure and landscape studies, compositional ideas, and preparatory drawings for larger frescoes and tapestries. Many of these, not meant for public consumption, let us into secrets which their painted cousins cannot.

Bonna himself has said that “With drawings, what really seduces me is the fact that they are generally the first idea of an artist.” There will be several examples in the show which reveal what artists were thinking as they worked out major painted masterpieces. These include a beautiful pen and ink drawing by Italian Baroque painter Annibale Carracci, who was planning an altarpiece for the Palazzo Caprara in Bologna.

The Virgin Mary sits in a billowing cushion of clouds and musical angels, cradling the baby Jesus and looking with fondness at the city of Bologna below her. Despite its thoroughly sketchy nature (the city is indicated by a few cursory lines), the scene is incredibly gentle and appealing.

This is one of four preparatory drawings for the oil painting which survive, and is generally considered to be the first. Carracci played with various details in his other sketches, changing the scale of the cityscape, and pointing the Madonna’s head in various directions. Eventually, the final work does away with the musical angels, reduces Bologna to a distant detail, and directs the Madonna’s eyes heavenward in a pose far more majesterial than the intimacy of the first sketch.

“It’s terribly interesting, this drawing, in the context,” says Weston-Lewis. “It’s interesting to see an artist, rather than progressively refining an idea, to have the fertility of invention to creat four different compositions along the same lines, each with slightly different flavours.” Weston-Lewis suspects that Carracci went straight to his patron with the rough sketches, who chose various aspects of each. Combining those ideas, the painter “went straight from there to painting on the canvas”.

While Carracci tried different positions in different sketches, many artists combined them all in one. The little-known Netherlandish artist Hans Speckaert made such a drawing of an unidentified subject. Legs are shifted around and toes pointed up and down as he strove for the best arrangement of figures. These changes of mind are called pentimenti. “That kind of thing can be really interesting in terms of tracking an artist’s thought processes,” says Weston-Lewis. Other artists must have thought so too, as several later copies exist of Speckaert’s drawing, faithfully reproduced, complete with pentimenti.

Bonna’s own personal favourite is a striking drawing by Italian Mannerist Parmigianino, of the Holy Family with Shepherds and Angels. Rarely seen in the original, it’s a stunning example of the artist’s fluid drawing style. The figure group is a coherent mass of exuberant curlicues, dashed off in a creative frenzy. This is another area where drawings can trump their painted counterparts: sheer spontaneity.

“Spontaneity, in drawings of that kind,” says Weston-Lewis, “the individual touch of the master, and the rapidity with which something has been done, is perhaps that much more obvious in a drawing than it would be in most paintings, simply because physically it takes a lot less time to do – certainly in an Old Master context.” To paint a composition like this would have taken Parmigianino weeks and months of layering and glazes, instead of dashing it off in pen and ink while the idea was fresh in his mind.

Another common advantage with drawings is their direct connection to the real world, exemplified by the little landscape made by Claude Lorrain when, old and infirm, he took a rare walk in the country. The Frenchman’s reputation was built on grand, painted scenes, bathed in golden light; bearing little relation to any single place, they were idealised composites, based on a formula which turned real life into epic theatre.

But this chalk and wash drawing is the real thing: Mount Soracte and the trees in front of it are fresh, allowed to be themselves, with not a single ancient Roman maiden in sight. Drawings such as this are the closest we can come to seeing the world as it really was, before photographs were invented.

This documentary approach is fascinating to us now, in an era which values reality over all else. Rembrandt’s unassuming view of Sloten, a little village outside Amsterdam, contains the figure of a man at work at the side of the road. Curators reckon the man was fixing the dyke with a shovel. Just like that, we are connected with a particular moment in a particular day in 1650.

First thoughts, spontaneity, and real life: these are just a few of the ways that drawings can quietly hold their own. Throw in beauty, quality and some of the biggest names in art history, and you have several excellent reasons to head down those stairs when Raphael To Renoir opens on 5 June.

Catrìona Black, The Herald 29.05.09