ABSTRACT
Drawings deemed by the modern eye to be of slight quality rarely receive attention from art historians or from museum curators - the present guardians of taste. This neglected category of drawings often includes copied drawings by unknown artists. In attempting to answer the various questions that such drawings provoke, it is necessary to consider both the individual sources of the drawings and the often functional intentions behind their original creation. Aside from royal collecting, the acquisition of drawings in the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century was undoubtedly an activity limited to artists, dealers and a tiny proportion of the culturally-sophisticated, city-dwelling elite - sometimes known as 'amateurs'. The central focus of this paper is a now-dismantled, seventeenth-century album of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drawings by German, Dutch, Flemish and Italian artists. The album into which the drawings had initially been pasted belonged to George Grote (1794-1871), a prominent banker, classical scholar and a member of the original council of University College London. Now known as the 'Grote Collection', the detached drawings are housed in the College Art Collections at University College, the album having been donated to the University in 1872 by Grote's widow. 1
