The Folger has an estimated 50,000 works on paper, including original works such as drawings, sketches, and watercolors; photographs; and prints of all kinds, including etchings and engravings. Its unbound works alone include some 8,000 prints, 1,500 photographs, and 4,000 original works.
The Folger has more than 2,000 examples of the work of the seventeenth-century artist Wenceslaus Hollar, about 500 in the Art Collection itself, and the rest included in period books. Its collection of drawings by George Romney is the second-largest in North America and the third-largest in the world; it was first cataloged in the 1970s by art historian Yvonne Romney Dixon, a descendant of the artist, who later curated an exhibition on the subject in 1998.
The Folger also holds original works on paper by George Cruikshank, Francis Hayman, and John Massey Wright among others. Important early prints include works by Hans Vredeman de Vries, the van de Passe family, Abraham Bosse, and Romeyn de Hooghe. Modern prints include approximately 4,000 eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth-century Shakespeare prints, cataloged by play, act, and scene, or by character.
In addition to these works on paper, the Folger also houses the Valerian and Laura Lada-Mocarski Decorated Paper Collection. This collection, consisting of some 650 sheets (some of them still uncut), preserves a variety of rare and even unique decorated papers originally intended for use as endpapers or on bindings.
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| Jan van der Straet. Nova reperta. Engraving, ca. 1600 |
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