Brooklyn Museum - Sketchbook of English Landscape and Coastal Scenery - William Trost Richards - overall

A sketchbook is a book or pad with blank pages for sketching and is frequently used by artists for drawing or painting as a part of their creative process. Some also use sketchbooks as a sort of blueprint for future art pieces. The exhibition of sketchbooks at the

Fogg Art Museum The Harvard Art Museums are part of Harvard University and comprise three museums: the Fogg Museum (established in 1895), the Busch-Reisinger Museum (established in 1903), and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum (established in 1985), and four research ...

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of highe ...

in 2006 suggested that there were two broad categories for classifying sketches: *Observation: this focuses on the documentation of the external world and includes many such travel and nature studies and sketches recording an artist's travels. *Invention: this follows the artists' digressions and internal journeys as they develop compositional ideas.

Types of sketchbooks

Sketchbooks come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, with varied covers, and differing numbers of pages. Sketchbooks began as a way to provide a readily available supply of drawing paper in the convenient form of a book. Finish of the work found in the sketchbook varies widely depending on the artist and their style of work, with some having very simple drawings and notes, and some having highly worked images. Over time, it might allow others to see the artist's progress, as their style and skills develop. Many artists personalize their sketchbook by decorating the covers. Sketches are sometimes removed from sketchbooks at a later date. Sketchbooks made out of high quality paper, differentiated by weight (referring to density of the sheets) and tooth (also called grain), allow for a wide variety of techniques to be used, ranging from pencil drawings, to

watercolor Watercolor (American English) or watercolour (British English; see spelling differences), also ''aquarelle'' (; from Italian diminutive of Latin ''aqua'' "water"), is a painting method”Watercolor may be as old as art itself, going back to t ...

, to colored pencil, to pen and ink, and so on. Certain paper characteristics might be more desirable for use with certain mediums. Sketchbook paper comes in a variety of tones, ranging from pure white, to cream, and includes less common varieties, such as gray. In displays of contemporary art, as well as historical retrospectives, intimate and ephemeral records are increasingly valued, resulting in the exhibition of sketchbooks alongside "finished" artworks. Computer technology has allowed for the development of digital sketchbooks, such as Apple's iPad devices and Microsoft's Surface tablets.

Online sketchbooks

The

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...

has increased access to documents such as the sketchbooks of famous artists which previously would only be seen in an exhibition. A number of the sketchbooks of famous artists have been digitally recorded and are now available online. Links are provided in the external links section below. * Leonardo da Vinci (Italian 1452-1519) made hundreds of pages of sketchbooks during his life, filled with drawings and writings that went along with his very curious mind, you can find some of his sketchbook pages at the following link: *
www.unmuseum.org
*

Rembrandt Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (, ; 15 July 1606 – 4 October 1669), usually simply known as Rembrandt, was a Dutch Golden Age painter, printmaker and draughtsman. An innovative and prolific master in three media, he is generally consi ...

van Rijn (Dutch 1606-1669) Good example of Rembrandt's sketches and drawings can be found in:
the British Museum
and
Getty Museum – sketch of an artist in his studio
*

Goya Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (; ; 30 March 174616 April 1828) was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker. He is considered the most important Spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. His paintings, drawings, and e ...

(Spanish 1746- 1828) was a painter and print maker and made an important contribution to the art of drawing.
The Italian Sketchbook
created in the 1770s and currently in the Museo del Prado

This link provides a summary of each of the albums, what it contains and what materials were used — the site is still under construction. *
sketchbook drawings held by Museum of Fine Art in Boston
*

J. M. W. Turner Joseph Mallord William Turner (23 April 177519 December 1851), known in his time as William Turner, was an English Romantic painter, printmaker and watercolourist. He is known for his expressive colouring, imaginative landscapes and turbule ...

(English 1775-1851) produced 300 sketchbooks and around 30,000 sketches and watercolours on his travels. Five years after his death, the majority of his art was bequeathed to the nation and is housed at Tate Britain
Turner sketchbooks, Turner Bequest, Tate Britain
This link provides access to all 300 sketchbooks. *

John Constable John Constable (; 11 June 1776 – 31 March 1837) was an English landscape painter in the Romantic tradition. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for revolutionising the genre of landscape painting with his pictures of Dedham Vale, the ...

(English 1776–1837) believed in the importance of working from life and based his paintings on sketches and drawings of the

landscape A landscape is the visible features of an area of land, its landforms, and how they integrate with natural or man-made features, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal.''New Oxford American Dictionary''. A landscape includes the ...

. Some of his sketches were in oil while others were in small sketchbooks. This is an example of
Sketchbook at the Victoria and Albert Museum

(English 1801–1878) accompanied Darwin on the Beagle as expedition artist and produced three detailed sketchbooks of places visited and objects seen on the expedition. This i

and this i

which are in the Cambridge University Library. This i
a categorised list of sketchbook images
Most of the sketchbook images are in graphite. Click on a link to see images and on an image to see a larger image and more detail about it. *

Paul Cézanne Paul Cézanne ( , , ; ; 19 January 1839 – 22 October 1906) was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th-century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically d ...

(French 1839-1906) worked from life and made detailed observations of form in his drawings and sketches as well as his paintings. Dover Publications has reproduce
one of Cézanne's sketchbooks
*

Vincent van Gogh Vincent Willem van Gogh (; 30 March 185329 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who posthumously became one of the most famous and influential figures in Western art history. In a decade, he created about 2,100 artworks, inclu ...

(Dutch 1853–1890) made preliminary drawings (sketches) prior to developing his paintings. He often drew with a reed pen and ink. Students of mark-making will probably be interested in the great range of marks he used routinely.
Examples from the 2005 exhibition of Van Gogh Drawings at the Metropolitan Museum, New York
*

John Singer Sargent John Singer Sargent (; January 12, 1856 – April 14, 1925) was an American expatriate artist, considered the "leading portrait painter of his generation" for his evocations of Edwardian-era luxury. He created roughly 900 oil paintings and mor ...

(1856–1925
Sargent at Harvard — the Harvard University Art Museums' collection of sketchbooks
* Various American Artists
Sketchbooks in the Archives of American Art
nbsp;— the curators' choice of 17 sketchbooks ''"demonstrates the broad range of material available for research at the

Archives of American Art The Archives of American Art is the largest collection of primary resources documenting the history of the visual arts in the United States. More than 20 million items of original material are housed in the Archives' research centers in Washing ...

from academic notebooks with anatomical studies to illustrated journals, ranging in date from the 1840s to the 1970s."'' *

Henry Moore Henry Spencer Moore (30 July 1898 – 31 August 1986) was an English artist. He is best known for his semi- abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art. As well as sculpture, Moore produced ...

(English 1898–1986)
early drawings (1916-1939) of ideas / for sculptures
*

David Hockney David Hockney (born 9 July 1937) is an English painter, draftsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists o ...

(contemporary) has produced a DVD of fifteen palm-sized sketchbooks (of 25) produced during for a period of 18 months in 2002–2003 (copyright/published by David Hockney/Gregory Evans Inc.). The sketches chronicle his home, his studio, his travels, landscapes,

still life A still life (plural: still lifes) is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which are either natural (food, flowers, dead animals, plants, rocks, shells, etc.) or man-made (drinking glasses, bo ...

s, hotel rooms, his friends and their families. * Xavier Pick (English 1972– )
A life in sketchbooks
contemporary illustrator who has been drawing constantly in his sketchbooks both personal and internationally, most notably as a war artist.

References

External links

Under Cover — Artists Sketchbooks" Exhibition at Harvard University Art Museums (Fogg) 2006
*[http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?did=1&uin=uk.bl.ethos.509338 A PhD thesis by artist Paul Ryan from 2009, on how sketchbooks mean what they do, available online from The British Library's Ethos service.] {{Use dmy dates, date=September 2019 Drawing Visual arts materials Notebooks

Types of sketchbooks

Online sketchbooks

See also

References

External links