Prints & Drawings by Anonymous Artists
- Italian 15th Century, The Man of Sorrows
- Florentine ca. 1470, Music Manuscript
- Greek or Byzantine 15th-16th Century, The Risen Christ
- French ca. 1500, The Mass of St. Gregory
- Italian 16th Century, Annunciation to the Virgin
- Itallian 16th Century, Study for a Draped Female Figure
- Dutch 16th Century, Christ Feeding the Five Thousand
- German 16th Century, Ornament with an Owl
- Italian 16th Century, The Virgin at the Cradle
- Italian 16th Century, The Forefathers of Christ
- Master L, Adoration of the Magi
- Master RR, Esther Before Ahasuerus
- Monogramist HWB, Sketches of Lovers
- Italian 16th Century, Gladiators in an Arena
- School of Fontainebleau, The Birth of the Virgin
- Flemish 16th Century, Hercules Fighting the Nemean Lion
- Flemish (?) 16th-17th Century, Satyr and Nymph Embracing
- after Ludolph Büsinck, Saint Matthew
- Flemish 17th Century, Doctor, Dying Miser
- Bolognese 17th Century, Robed, Seated Male Figure
- French 17th Century, Le Palais de Neptune
- Italian 17th Century, Male Figure in the Clouds
- Italian 17th -18 th Century, Panel of Ornament with Putti
- Dutch (?) 18th Century, Landscape with a River
- British 18th Century, A Woman Seated in an Arm Chair
- Italian late 18th Century, Neptune Before Juno
- French (?) late 18th-Early 19th Century, Bathers in a Landscape
- Spanish (?) 19th Century (?), Vanitas
- British 19th Century, Extensive Landscape
- Barbizon School 19th Century, Pair of River Landscapes
- American Mid-19th Century, Maylandville Road
- Spanish 19th Century, Street Scene
- French 19th Century, En Auvergne
- French 19th Century, Cavalry Skirmish
- British 19th Century, Badshahi Qila
- French 19th Century, Design for a Ceiling
- Russian 19th Century, Fortified Military Encampment
- American late 19th Century, Sheep on a Country Road
- British 19th (?) Century, Llyn Ogwen, North Wales
- German or Austrian 19th-20th Century, Prometheus Bound
- British 20th (?) Century, The Knife Grinder
- British 20th Century, The Knife Grinder
- German 20th Century, Death Leading a Woman
- American 20th Century, Straphanger
Anonymous art has been with us since the dawn of civilization, hardly surprising. What is odd, perhaps, is that it has persisted to our own day, artists, accidentally or even purposely, leaving works undocumented and unsigned, or simply vanishing into obscurity, leaving paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, photographs to be identified only as of unknown authorship. But there are different ways of being anonymous. There are works signed with a pseudonym, a monogram or a device, bodies of work by recognizable artists whose real names and conditions of life we do not know. There are those unsigned works whose authorship no one can identify, or no one thus far has done so. And then there are those works that merely we cannot identify, but perhaps someone else can. There may be a number of those in this exhibition and we, of course, invite viewers to let us know what we have missed.
It is a truism of the art business that almost the first necessity for selling a work is that one must be able to say, with some authority, who did it. So an exhibit such as this one goes totally against the grain. There is, however, one great advantage in buying anonymous prints or drawings, and that is that one is buying purely on the basis of the quality and interest of the particular work. This is, to us, far preferable to spending money on some negligible scrap, or even a forgery, that happens to have an important artist’s name attached to it.
