Drawn Together: New Perspectives on Dutch Drawings 1500-1800 brings together over a dozen essays by an international cohort of scholars and curators who presented their work at the Peck Drawings Symposium held at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, in 2023. The symposium was held in conjunction with the exhibition Drawn to Life: Master Drawings from the Age of Rembrandt in the Peck Collection at the Ackland Art Museum, held at the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam in 2022 and 2023. This event offered a timely forum for sharing new research on early modern Netherlandish, Dutch, and Flemish drawings.
Organized under five thematic sections, this collection of previously unpublished essays by both established and emerging voices treats a range of subjects, including sketches and sketchbooks, design and study drawings, collectors and the market for drawings, material and technical aspects of drawings, and new research related to the oeuvres of artists in need of greater attention.
Together, these essays not only deepen our historical understanding of Dutch drawings but also challenge longstanding assumptions about how they were made, used, valued, and preserved. Richly illustrated and intellectually engaging, Drawn Together offers insight into a dynamic field that continues to evolve through interdisciplinary approaches, reinvigorating the study of works on paper for a new generation of scholars and readers.
Drawn Together is a companion volume to Drawn to Life: Master Drawings from the Age of Rembrandt in the Peck Collection at the Ackland Art Museum, an exhibition catalogue featuring a selection of exceptional seventeenth-century Dutch drawings from the Peck Collection in the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Featuring many previously unpublished and rarely exhibited works, the catalogue brings together examples by some of the best-known artists of the era, such as Abraham Bloemaert, Rembrandt van Rijn, Jan van Goyen, and Frans van Mieris.
Drawn Together: New Perspectives on Dutch Drawings 1500-1800
Edited by Dana Cowen and Robert Fucci
September 2026
Hardback, 280 x 245 mm
288 pages, 170 colour illus.
£40 / €45 / $50
ISBN: 978-1-915401-23-6
About the authors
Dana Cowen is the Sheldon Peck Curator for European and American Art at the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Curator of the Peck Collection. She was the co-curator of Drawn to Life: Master Drawings from the Age of Rembrandt in the Peck Collection at the Ackland Art Museum.
Robert Fucci is a lecturer in art history at the University of Amsterdam, and a specialist in early modern works on paper. He was the co-curator of Drawn to Life: Master Drawings from the Age of Rembrandt in the Peck Collection at the Ackland Art Museum and author of the accompanying exhibition catalogue.