Drawing in Silver And Gold: Leonardo to Jasper Johns

This collaborative exhibition with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, charts for the very first time the development across Europe of metalpoint
through five centuries from Leonardo to the present day. Drawing with a metal stylus, most commonly one made predominantly of silver, on a roughened preparation that ensured a trace of the metal was left on the surface was the cornerstone of the drawing-centred education of artists from the mid-1400s.

The show highlights the remarkable graphic holdings of works in metalpoint in the British Museum but also features major loans (including four of Leonardo’s greatest silverpoint studies from the Royal Collection) from European and American museums as well as private collections. Such a
glittering array of metalpoint drawings by the greatest masters of the technique has never been assembled before, or one that explores in such depths its fluctuating popularity over half a The successful Spotlight tours and loans, millennia.