Ephraim Rubenstein

Exceptionally modest, reserved to a fault and largely unknown outside her immediate circle, Robin Smith is, nonetheless, one of the best portrait/figure painters working today.

We have all had the experience of going to an exhibition and having one painting stand out so completely in your mind, that you remember little, if anything else, about what you have seen.

The 16th-century Italian drawings in a recent exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, in New York City, are beautiful working drawings that point toward grand final creations far beyond the edges of the paper and reveal the competing influences of Raphael and Michelangelo.

Whether at a court ball or at a burial, on the street or in a moving train, the German draftsman Adolph Menzel (1815-1905) exploited every opportunity that presented itself to record on paper whatever caught his eye.

Through the careful orchestration of figures and still life objects, this Philadelphia oil painter uses his studio as the setting for both natural and metaphorical scenes.

Several established contemporary artists have approached the subject of self-portraiture in different ways, depicting who they are or who they wish to be at various times in their lives.

Because silverpoint drawings invite us to come close and examine them carefully, here is a close-up look at several masterful contemporary silverpoint drawings.

Maryland artist Mark Karnes paints everyday scenes by sketching value studies in ink or watercolor then slowly painting in oil or acrylic without a detailed preparatory drawing.

Prud'hon drew from the figure throughout his career, and now those "académies" anchor his reputation. How did he draw such stunning figure studies?

Tonal drawing—the juxtaposition of relative values, the notion of seeing masses rather than outlines—more closely replicates the way humans see than do lines. This emotional way of depicting the world has been explored since Leonardo; modern artists have mastered it.