An Old Master Print COllectiOn: 14OO-19OO

If we are to approach the lived experience of time, let us seek that fragile meeting point where action, necessarily narrated, and contemplation, necessarily silent, at last transcend their futile antagonism.

Across five centuries, Old Master prints sustain a meditation on time. This collection is therefore less a survey than a proposition. The works assembled here are united by a shared aura: they persist beyond the gaze that encounters them, awaiting future viewers capable of reactivating the sense of duration these sheets have carried across generations. In this sense, they bear a form of melancholy: mine, yours, once theirs, and soon again another’s.

From this point, I offer, across the chapters of this online catalogue, reflections on a cultural poetics of graphic representation, in which the relations between action and contemplation are continually renegotiated. The aim is to bring into focus visual repertoires that are never mutually exclusive, though each offers a singular response to a common challenge: through printmaking, to articulate time as experience.

the collector