Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., is the curator of the Northern European Art Collection at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C.

Ger Luijten has been head of the Rijksprentenkabinet of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and now is director of the Fondation Custodia in Paris.

The catalogue for the international exhibition, Drawings for Paintings in the Age of Rembrandt captures the different ways in which artists used preliminary or construction drawings when composing and refining their paintings.

Seventeenth-century Dutch landscapes, still lifes, and scenes of daily life are so realistic in appearance that one would think that the artists painted from life. They actually executed their works in their studios, however, often on the basis of drawings. Dutch artists made many types of preliminary drawings, including broad compositional sketches, drawings of the landscape in their sketchbooks, counterproofs, construction drawings, and individual figural studies. Artists also indicated compositional ideas on their canvases and panels using underdrawings that are revealed through infrared reflectography. This volume features a wide variety of subject types and artists, among others Hendrick Avercamp, Gerrit Berckheyde, Aelbert Cuyp, Jan van Goyen, Adriaen van Ostade, Jacob van Ruisdael, Pieter Saenredam, and Rembrandt van Rijn. This fully illustrated exhibition catalogue includes three scholarly essays as well as entries on all the artists included in the show written by these and other experts.