British Museum exhibits trio of artistic bequests

Three very different collections of drawings by a host of top artists are on display in an exhibition of bequests to the British Museum.

The antiquarian and art collector Richard Payne Knight bequeathed over a thousand drawings to the British Museum. Nina Drucker, a collector of 18th to 20th-century art, left her 30 drawings from her collection to the museum, and numerous collectors have gifted drawings by Antoine Watteau.

So three collections, all sharing the same medium of drawings, are on display side by side, giving you a broad collection to look at.

Some of the drawings depict 19th-century London, with its smokestacks filling the air with pollution, which appears misty and evocative in print, if you overlook the smell and illnesses they actually caused.

Elsewhere, lots of anatomical studies by Watteau as well as his many sketches of the people he saw around him.

Some of the sketches are marked with “turn over” on the paper, which is rather harder when they are secured to the wall, but it made me think that one day we should have an exhibition of the backs of famous paintings. It’d be a brave curator who flips all their paintings around to face the walls, but I bet it’d be amazing.

In the meantime, there are three exhibitions in Room 90 of the British Museum (top floor at the back of the museum). All are free to visit.

Colour and line Watteau drawings – open to 14th Sept 2025

Raphael to Cozens drawings from the Richard Payne Knight bequest – open to 14th Sept 2025

Robert Healy to John Minton the Nina Drucker bequest open to 21st Sept 2025.