A five-year research project, conducted on over a thousand sheets held by the British Museum, led to a review of the attributions, techniques, and functions of drawing in the Netherlands between the 15th and 16th centuries. This work led to Early Netherlandish drawings, a selection of approximately 110 works that paints a less linear picture than historiography has long suggested. What emerges most clearly is the nature of drawing itself: not an autonomous object, but a working tool within artistic production. Preparatory studies for paintings, models for tapestries, cartoons for stained glass and designs for prints reveal a widespread, functional practice, often intended to be discarded or replaced. The scarcity of surviving sheets is therefore structural rather than accidental. Technical investigations, including the analysis of supports, watermarks and graphic materials, have made it possible to distinguish more precisely between an artist’s hand and workshop production. Some drawings long attributed to Rogier van der Weyden are now reassigned to his workshop, highlighting a collective system in which authorship is shared and layered. Alongside this operational dimension, a gradual shift becomes visible. Over the course of the 16th century, drawing gains greater visual autonomy: sheets not directly linked to finished works become more frequent, while studies from life, landscapes and scenes of everyday life begin to appear. This signals a cultural transformation that, at a different pace, brings the Northern European context closer to the Italian one, where drawing had already become a collectible medium. The exhibition does not construct a sequence of masterpieces, but a network of evidence. What emerges is a less idealized practice, made of corrections, copies and exercises. Drawing appears as a space of verification, where the image takes shape before being transferred elsewhere, or sometimes without ever being.
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