Whatever else you can say about it, “The Thaw Collection of Master Drawings: Acquisitions Since 2002” offers instructive examples of how artists have dealt with the challenge of drawing foliage. Do they depict it en masse or one leaf at a time? As impressionistic mélange or botanical artifacts? The forest or the trees? The nineteenth-century German engraver Heinrich Reinhold bridged the gap by honing in on the specificities of this leaf or that vine within a broader orchestration of tangled branches. Adrian Zingg, Reinhold’s Swiss contemporary, codified nature by transforming it into jagged shards of patterning. In a spare and scratchy ink drawing circa 1790, Jakob Philipp Hackert rendered foliage as an electrical current. One hundred years later, Edgar Degas elicited the natural world through frantic areas of smudged pastel.
There’s more to “Acquisitions Since 2002” than a sterling array of stylistic how-tos, not least the generosity of the former art dealer Eugene V. Thaw and his wife Clare. The current exhibition is the fifth at the Morgan devoted to the Thaw Collection. (A concurrent show at the museum, “Studying Nature: Oil Sketches from the Thaw Collection,” highlights another aspect of the couple’s artistic interests.) Since 1975, the Thaws have donated over four hundred drawings to the Morgan, often with the intent of filling gaps in the museum’s holdings. That feels like the case here: Any exhibition that traverses an ink study for a Renaissance temple and The Factory—or, at least, Jamie Wyeth’s