Get Drawn Into Getty’s Newest Exhibition

The J. Paul Getty Museum presents Learning to Draw, an exhibition that explores artistic training and the mastery of drawing in Europe from the 16th through 19th centuries.

On view at the Getty Center from October 21, 2025 through January 25, 2026, the exhibition features 32 drawings, primarily from the Getty Museum’s collection, that showcase how students sought to acquire the fundamental skill of drawing.

“Drawing has long been considered the foundation of almost all other forms of art–painting, sculpture, and architecture–beginning in the Renaissance and continuing to the present day,” says Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle Director of the Getty Museum. “Through a selection of important and captivating works in the Getty Museum’s collection, this exhibition examines how this crucial skill was taught and learned, and how the adoption of new technologies, materials and skills gave rise to new styles and movements in art.”

Learning to Draw will highlight the sequence of exercises that came to underpin drawing instruction over the centuries: Drawing from Art; Drawing from Life; and Drawing from Landscape. The exhibition will include a sketching table where visitors can try their hand at drawing (materials provided) and a space to display their creations at the gallery entrance. There will also be drop-in drawing sessions and live drawing demonstrations related to the exhibition that are free and require no reservations.

Often, art students would begin by copying works of art, starting with two-dimensional prints, drawings, and paintings. Drawing from art brought an understanding of the essential building blocks of line, value, proportion, and perspective, while also developing familiarity with different drawing materials such as ink, charcoal, and chalk. Artists were encouraged to study the best examples available. In Federico Zuccaro’s Taddeo in the Sistine Chapel Drawing Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, the artist in the scene uses a pen to work over his red-chalk sketch of the famous fresco that decorates the altar wall of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel. From her home in Augsburg, Germany, 14-year-old Anna Catharina Rugendas studied a complex engraving for her 1714 drawing of a Farmer Couple Surrounded by their Animals and Farming Tools.

Once students gained proficiency in capturing static objects on paper, they were ready for the challenge of drawing from life. Art academies typically hired models and arranged classes, while studios and groups of artists made informal studies of colleagues, friends, or family. Women at this time were excluded from participating in life-drawing classes as students, and modeling carried a social stigma for them. One of six drawings in the exhibition on loan from the Katrin Bellinger Collection, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s Life-Drawing Class, shows a casual academy set up by a group of artists in Venice, surrounding a model on a raised platform with a timer at his feet to measure the duration of the pose.

Drawing from landscape and the study of nature honed students’ skill in the observation of features both close-up and distant, as well as reinforcing the understanding of perspective. French artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard made Ruins of an Imperial Palace, Rome as a student at the Académie de France in Rome, a destination for many lucky artists who won the prestigious Prix de Rome, a French scholarship for art students. Fragonard, like many other students, was encouraged to sketch the nature and landscape around him as well as the antiquities, and his use of red chalk in this work conveys the bright sunlight and inherent warmth of the scene.

“Drawing is a skill, gained through study and practice,” says Julian Brooks, senior curator of drawings at the Getty Museum. “While this exhibition includes superlative examples from over the centuries that will inspire wonder and appreciation, I hope that visitors will have fun too sketching at the drawing table. Any time spent with a pencil in hand can bring satisfaction no matter the result, and we now know that such focus can reduce stress and increase well-being. What more can you ask for?”

Learning to Draw is curated by Julian Brooks, senior curator of drawings at the Getty Museum, and Casey Lee, former curatorial assistant at the Getty Museum.