But First, Sketch

Leonardo da Vinci was known to pull a sketchbook from his pocket and set down ideas in quick drawings.

Although this may seem unremarkable today, Leonardo was, in fact, part of the first generation of European artists trained from a young age to make rapid, spontaneous sketches and to preserve them in a bound volume. Paper was a valuable commodity, but as it became more widely available, artists increasingly took up sketchbooks to capture and store their first sparks of inspiration.

Artists still love sketchbooks—for jotting down visual ideas, seizing a sudden burst of inspiration, experimenting with different concepts, or recording what they see around them. Sketchbook drawings can be informal and highly personal, allowing us to peer over an artist’s shoulder and follow a creative journey. But because relatively few sketchbooks have come down to us intact—many were disbound at some point and their individual pages cut loose and scattered far and wide—Special Collections at the Getty Research Institute (GRI), along with the Getty Museum, are notable for preserving a substantial number of intact artists’ sketchbooks.

Researchers can enjoy the intimate experience of handling these objects—holding them, turning the pages, tracking the artist’s thoughts by moving from page to page—and by doing so, may make exciting discoveries. Many of these sketchbooks have also been fully digitized, allowing anyone, anywhere, to leaf through them virtually.

Sketchbooks created as part of an artist’s education are an important component of the GRI’s collections. From the later 1400s to the turn of the 20th century, European artists began their training by executing drawings after the works of celebrated makers, both living and dead, as well as antiquities. This type of artistic education was further codified beginning in the later 1600s, when several European countries founded national academies for the training of painters, sculptors, and architects, institutions that advocated for them to travel to Rome and make drawings after ancient and Renaissance art. The GRI collection is especially rich in sketchbooks created in the late 18th and early 19th centuries by French artists who spent time at the Académie de France à Rome.

Getty’s 19th-century sketchbooks also illustrate how European artists moved away from the style and subjects associated with academic art and turned to depictions of everyday life—the foundation of Impressionist and Postimpressionist art. In 1847, for example, Rosa Bonheur, an accomplished painter of animals, filled a sketchbook with her observations of life in rural France, including drawings she made while standing in the fields during the harvest. Edgar Degas similarly used a sketchbook to record views of daily life, including women hard at work doing laundry. In the following century, a young Mark Rothko would also sketch what was before him: a houseplant, comfy armchair, fellow painters at work at an easel.

Sketchbooks of the 20th and 21st centuries have also been used for artists’ early studies, travel records, and as preparation for and documentation of specific projects. As American sculptor Malvina Hoffman traveled through the Americas, Europe, and Asia in the early 1930s, for instance, she took photographs, wrote notes, and made portrait drawings in preparation for a bronze sculpture series commissioned for the Chicago Field Museum exhibition The Races of Mankind. And when Diego Rivera was planning murals for sites in San Francisco, he visited local mines to draw laborers directly from life.

Many sketchbooks have entered the GRI as part of larger artists’ archives, including those of Eleanor Antin, Frederick Hammersley, Maren Hassinger, Richard Hunt, David Lamelas, and Barbara T. Smith. And in addition to the sketchbooks of painters, sculptors, and printmakers, the GRI also preserves large numbers of those made by architects, designers, and craftspeople working in the applied arts across Europe and America. Examples include 28 sketchbooks from the Pickford Waller design firm, made between 1896 and 1926 and devoted to art nouveau patterns for book covers, bookplates, and page borders, and the fascinating sketchbooks created by influential architects Steven Ehrlich, Hans Hollein, Daniel Libeskind, J. J. P. Oud, Hans Poelzig, Aldo Rossi, and Lebbeus Woods.

If you’d like to learn more, the Sketchbooks Research Guide offers a more thorough introduction to the GRI and Getty Museum’s sketchbooks along with a brief overview of their historical development and sustained artistic use from the Renaissance to the contemporary.