In 2017, Olivier Meslay, the director of the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, had dinner with Corinne Le Bitouzé, the assistant director of the department of prints and photography of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. They discussed the library’s vast holdings of works on paper, especially the drawings, described by Le Bitouzé as “a small collection—only a few hundred thousand drawings” that, despite their importance, are “barely studied.” The conversation inspired the idea of a collaboration between the two institutions to make these works better known. A few years later, this wish was made a possibility by the Paper Project, a new grant program of the Getty Foundation designed to support institutions everywhere in maintaining and studying their works-on-paper collections, while training a new generation of curators specializing in the field. The Paper Project sponsored a curatorial fellow to assist with research and to work with curators from the Clark and the bnf. The result? “Promenades on Paper: Eighteenth-Century French Drawings from the Bibliothèque nationale de France,” a dazzling installation of stellar works at the Clark Art Institute.¹ “Promenades on Paper” is the first public exhibition devoted to the bnf’s eighteenth-century drawings, many of them now on view for the first time ever. In a close collaboration between the Clark and the bnf, this remarkable show was curated by the Clark’s Esther Bell and Anne Leonard, the Clark-Getty curatorial fellow Sarah Grandin, and the bnf’s Corinne Le Bitouzé, Pauline Chougnet, and Chloé Perrot.