French drawings are a recent area of interest for us, though we have long sought French Mannerist woodcuts, engravings, and etchings. On various research trips to France and England from the 1980s on, we acquired original prints by Jean Cousin the Younger, Etienne Delaune, Rene Boyvin, and Thomas de Leu; we also have acquired works by Italian Renaissance printmakers like Giorgio Ghisi documenting works by Italian artists at Fontainebleau. We have had three drawings by Mouricault on the theme of Cupid and Psyche ever since Andy fell in love with them in 1980 while in Paris working on Book III of Spenser's Faerie Queene and on Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. Our more recent acquisitions of drawings by Etienne Parrocel, and Jean François de Neufforge (Comblain-au-Point, 1714-1791 Paris), a sculptor, architect, and printmaker), who sometimes signs his drawings I:D:N, are responses to interesting pieces that caught our eye either because one or both of us was interested in a particular image or because someone made us an offer we couldn't refuse, in the case of Neufforge, a portfolio of drawings mostly by de Neufforge, but also containing several 17th-century Flemish drawings; our purchase of a beautiful pen-and-ink drawing by someone close to Boucher depicting Diana, a hunting dog, and one of her nymphs was simply unavoidable (see below).

Our interest in 17th-century pieces stems largely from Sonja's interest in Antoinette Bouzonnet Stella's engravings after Giulio Romano's designs for a series of stucco sculptures for the Sala degli Stucchi in the Palazzo del Te in Mantua (we just acquired a complete set of the first printing of these pieces; we also just acquired Diana Scultori's three engravings from c. 1575 of three of the same scenes); for Sonja's review of a 2010 exhibition of the 25 engravings by Antoinette Bouzonnet Stella at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC, see "Pomp and Power: Antoinette Bouzonnet Stella's Entrance of the Emperor Sigismund into Mantua" in Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 5 (2010), pp. 269-79). A major exhibition at the National Gallery of Art (and the accompanying book by Margaret Morgan Grasselli), Renaissance to Revolution: French Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, 1500-1800 (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2009), offers a framework that may help us to begin to make more sense of the French School.