This is the Prints and Drawings study room at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art 2. So we
have an outstanding collection of artist's prints . There are over 35 000 works in this collection and
works on paper dating from the Renaissance through to the present day. This is Durer's engraving of
Melancholia. It's from 1540 and it's probably one of the most famous prints that he produced.
It's made using engraving so the meticulous nature of these tiny lines is just incredible.
The subject itself is very cryptic and it's been the source of academic discussion for centuries.
Here we have slightly later we have from 1653 Rembrandt's masterpiece The Three Crosses.
Rembrandt has created this using a technique called dry point which is a form of etching.
So the the lines of the drawing on on the printing plate have been produced by scraping directly
into the plate itself rather than into an acid resistant ground with as you would
with traditional etching. This is actually one of Rembrandt's printing plates - it's a small square of
copper and you can see where the design has been etched into the surface the lines of the design
still holding so you can see the image. This is a beggar woman. Many of Rembrandt's etching plates
haven't survived the course of time so for this one to have survived in this state is fantastic.
The great thing about having a collection here that spans from from the Renaissance right up
to the contemporaries, you get these fantastic juxtapositions in style and technique and
this is just incredible. This is from 1649 and it's by a French engraver called Claude Melade and
it's basically a showpiece where he's trying to convey just how talented he is. The whole image is
created with one single line so the engraved line starts spiraling out from the center of the nose
out to the edges it's a continuous line. Contours have been created by thickening and narrowing the
line at different points bringing them closer together rather like the contours on a map.
And whilst this has been so painstakingly produced quite intentionally the opposite applies here with
this monoprint by Tracey Emin. This is from 1998. It's got this very immediate feeling about it
and she's described the monoprint technique as almost like a stream of consciousness
because it allows her to spontaneously and directly draw the image and create her print.
This is a color wood cut made in the 1930s by the artist Mabel Royds. It's called Foxgloves.
These beautiful decorative images of flowers that she produced in the in the 30s are very popular.
Royds was a teacher at Edinburgh College of Art and it was while she was there that she
learnt the the technique of woodcut printing. A lot of the techniques that Royds used were
taken directly from the Japanese masters and what we have here is an example of one of our
Japanese prints from the collection. Although our collection is predominantly Western art we do have
quite a number of Japanese and Chinese prints and drawings as well as some Indian miniature drawings.