PROJECTS

Drawn to Italy: Collecting Drawings on the Grand Tour

My book considers the English experience viewing, copying, selling, and collecting Italian drawings on the Grand Tour. Through a series of case studies, including the previously unexamined travels of Montague Garrard Drake (1692–1728), Humphrey Chetham of Castleton (1680–1749), as well as the network of expatriates connected to the young artist William Kent (c. 1685–1748), this volume situates Italian drawings as a central factor in the molding of English collections, and the developing taste for the Italianate seen in England in the early eighteenth century. (In progress)

A Well-Mannered Woman: Mary Stansbury Ruiz’s Collection of 16th Century Prints

The 1988 Bequest of Mary Stansbury Ruiz contributed over 600 Mannerist prints to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)’s holdings, functioning as the backbone to the museum’s collection of early modern works on paper, and telling a distinctive story about collecting 16th-century prints in Southern California during the mid-20th century. The Ruiz gift is the central source for LACMA’s Old Master print collection, and it is valuably diverse, including many fine, rare impressions of prints by Marcantonio Raimondi, Giorgio Ghisi, Diana Scultori, Northern Mannerists, and artists active at Fontainebleau, as well as excellent examples of chiaroscuro woodcuts. This reexamination of one the most significant, yet under-studied, collections of sixteenth-century prints on the west coast sheds new light on Ruiz as a collector, and highlights recent research into the objects she brought together. (In progress)