Old Master Portrait Drawings 47 Works Dover Fine Art History of Art

A budding artist (at age 66) who does landscape, figurative and portrait work, I'm always looking for new teachers. Some of the best are long long dead. This collection of work continues to be very helpful and inspirational. You can't beat the price ! david logan Read more

This collection is a fine source for practice material. Picture quality is acceptable for study but may disappoint collectors. As an example, Ruben's drawing of Isabella Brant (page 37) appears faded. The chalkwork on the model's cheeks isn't visible, leaving a plain impression. Such loss of detail detracts from the vibrancy of the portraits. The plates in Hale's "Drawing Lessons from the Great Masters" and Coyle's "Anatomy Lessons from the Great Masters" are better reproduced. These books are pricier but worthwhile for detailed studies. Quality aside, Dover books are cheap, have variety, and make for good practice. Read more

Excellent Great reproductions of drawings' Read more

I love the Dover Fine Art books, but this one is a pass. As another review stated there are a couple of nice drawings in here by Rembrandt, Ingres, and a few other well known artists, but overall it is kind of boring. I have a Da Vinci book (Dover series) that is much more entertaining. The issue I have with this book is that it appears many of the drawings were cropped to focus on the line detail. That's fine, but it does not portray the drawing as a whole (spacial relationship). The crop jobs look awful too because many of the portraits do not have any space between the edge of the picture plane and the drawing itself. This causes a lot of tension that should not be there. I just received the Sargent and the Klimt Dover books and those will blow your hair back. So if you're interested in some nice drawing books, choose one of those. For the more classical approach go for Sargent, if you like your drawings to be a little more free flowing, go for Klimt. I will say though, seeing 500 year old drawings and putting them in context, does give this book some redeeming qualities. Also, this is not an expensive book, so my critiques are a little harsh, therefore I give it 3 stars. Read more

I used this book for reference in doing portraits. very usefull.I will show it to others in my group......soon..ok It was usefull Read more

EXCELLENT PRODUCT - RECOMMEND!! Read more

I bought this book to round out my collection of Old Master artwork. The portraits in this book are interesting, and they demonstrate the evolution of portrait drawing through the centuries. What impressed me the most is how similar are the drawing techniques used by such a variety of artists. One can learn a great deal about developing a solid portrait drawing technique from studying the pictures in this book. Read more

My dad loved it, Read more