Youth Kneeling before a Potentate, Albrecht Dürer. © The Ashmolean Museum

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is currently holding an exhibition of drawings that highlight the Museum’s small but prestigious collection of pieces by German artists from the 16th to 19th centuries.

Durer to Friedrich – German Drawings from the Ashmolean runs until May 20 2007 and consists of the collections of two different antiquarians.

Francis Douce bequeathed the earlier works, containing a number of works by Albrecht Durer, to Oxford University in 1834. The second group, dating from the 19th century, was given to the museum by Dr Grete Ring who came to England from Germany in the 1930s.

Figure of a Woman in Contemporary Dress, Hans Holbein the Younger. © The Ashmolean Museum

Together these collections offer a glimpse into some of the most striking drawings produced by German artists of the period including An Elderly Woman with Clasped Hands by Matthius Grünewald (1480 – 1528) which is reckoned to rank alongside the finest drawings by Albrecht Dürer.

You can of course decide for yourself as displayed here are works by Dürer, Grünewald and Holbein displayed along with later pieces by Caspar David Friedrich and the Nazarenes.

There are a handful of engravings and paintings but the majority of the 40 works are beautifully executed pencil drawings. The main subjects are Christian and classical figures, which is clearly a reflection of the times the artists were working in as well as the artist groups in which they moved.

Portrait of a Girl sitting in a Chair/, Franz Horny, the Ashmolean Museum

A highlight of the exhibition is Durer’s Youth Kneeling before a Potentate. Watched by two men looking through a window, a young man in a turban kneels before an elder in a vaulted chamber. The youth is thought to be a self portrait of the artist while the theme of the drawing is biblical, possibly Jacob departing from Isaac, Joseph before Pharaoh, or David and Saul.

The exhibition also boasts a fine costume study by Hans Holbein the Elder (1497 – 1543), which was used by the great nineteenth century art theorist, educator and patriarch John Ruskin to teach students the rules of drawing.

It’s easy to see why the Victorians were so enamored with the Renaissance portraitist and the simple drawing offers an insight into how he had the uncanny ability to capture a form through a clever use of light and what Ruskin described as “A perfectly sharp linear limit.”

Another important artist of the period was Hans Burgkmair (1473 – 1531) who operated in Augsburg. An active painter etcher and a designer of woodcuts, he played an significant role in the development of the chiaroscuro woodcut. The Ashmolean’s Portrait of a Man is a good opportunity to view this rare talent for capturing a likeness.

Portrait of the Artist's Wife, Nina, Friedrich Overbeck. © The Ashmolean Museum

Moving on two centuries, the exhibition includes Caspar David Friederich’s (1774 – 1840) Landscape in Bohemia with a View of Mount Jeschken, a sketched study from on of the artist’s numerous sketching tours.

Friedrich together with Friedrich Overbeck (1789 – 1869) who founded the artistic group the Brotherhood of St Luke, or the Nazarines, were based in Rome in the early 19th century and some of the works on display may have been intended for a proposed illustrated Bible.

The Prophet Elijah Casting his mantle over Elisha is thought to have been drawn with this ambitious, but never realized, project in mind.

The few landscapes displayed offer a welcome splash of colour, showing us ruggedly beautiful views of Germanic countryside. A particularly good example is The Brocken On a may Morning by Georg Heinrich Crola. A vista of fir trees stands before the peaks of the Harz Range and a small lonely figure, a hunter or woodsman, can be see in the distance.

This exhibition is situated on the second floor of the Museum and is accessed via a number of other galleries and it makes an welcome accompaniment to a more general visit to the Ashmolean.