The Department of Prints and Drawings is responsible for more than 20,000 drawings and watercolors, 35,000 prints, and 3,000 photographs from the sixteenth century to now.
Access to the collection while we are closed
While the Yale Center for British Art is closed for conservation work, access to the prints and drawings collection is limited. Effective August 1, 2024, the Study Room will be unavailable through the end of 2024.
Please email ycba.studyroom@yale.edu to discuss availability.
The collection is wide-ranging, from Tudor drawings and portrait miniatures to outstanding examples of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century watercolors by notable artists such as William Blake, J. M. W. Turner, and John Constable, to architectural drawings, and works relating to the former British Empire, especially the Subcontinent, the Caribbean, and the African diaspora. The collection has exceptional topographical prints, caricatures, mezzotint portraits, sporting art, and modern and contemporary prints, as well as a growing collection of photographs from the birth of photography to now.
Featured works
Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, A Young Daughter of the Picts, ca. 1585
John Robert Cozens, The Lake of Albano and Castle Gandolfo, ca. 1779
J. M. W. Turner, Mer de Glace, in the Valley of Chamouni, Switzerland, 1803
Nicholas Hilliard, Portrait of a Lady, between 1600 and 1615
William Blake, Jerusalem, Plate 99, “All Human Forms identified. . . ”, 1804 to 1820
Yinka Shonibare CBE (RA), Fake Death Picture (Death of Chatterton—Henry Wallis), 2011
Thomas Rowlandson, The Duchess of Devonshire and the Countess of Bessborough, 1790
William Henry Fox Talbot, Veronica in Bloom, between 1843 and 1844
Barbara Walker, The Big Secret II, 2015
Explore the YCBA’s Collections
Contact the Prints and Drawings department at ycba.prints@yale.edu
ycba.studyroom@yale.edu | +1 203 432 2840 | +1 203 432 7314 fax
