The Blanton Museum of Art's collection of French Drawings is less well known than its other collections. This title is the first to publish the museum's over 75 works in a variety of media, ranging in date from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Preliminary sketches, fully developed compositional studies, figure studies and finished drawings show the breadth of the medium. The collection has a strong series of Italianate examples as well - many never before published - from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the Academie royale de peinture et de sculpture was evolving into one of the dominant cultural and political institutions in Europe.