Young scholars and their prize-winning essays are the focus of the annual Master Drawings Symposium, returning in 2025 for its ninth year. The journal recognizes the best articles by authors under 40 years with an annual cash prize and provides an opportunity for the authors to present their findings in front of drawings enthusiasts.This year’s winner is Olivia Dill, a PhD candidate at Northwestern University and current Moore Curatorial Fellow at the Morgan Library & Museum. Her prize-winning research was conducted during her two years as the recipient of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a training program combining experience in three departments: Drawings and Prints, Paper Conservation, and Scientific Research. Besides assigning a previously anonymous watercolor of three insects, including an iridescent Rhinoceros beetle native to Brazil, to seventeenth-century Dutch natural history artist Pieter Holsteyn II (1614-1673), Ms. Dill used an interdisciplinary approach and technical analysis of several blue pigments, particularly smalt (ground cobalt and glass), to shed light on the artist’s color choices and his efforts to translate the beetle’s iridescence on a sheet of paper.2024 runner-up Tamara Kobel, MA from the University of Bern and a former fellow at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich, will delve into the fascinating world of Swiss artist Wilhelm Stettler (1643-1708). Focusing on his “Eyerstock,” a rich artistic tool of sketches and doodles that he described as his fertile pantry of motifs, she helps us understand what role his diverse sources (a menagerie of finely drawn animals, war machines, musical instruments, skeletons, flowers, temples, and ships) played in the artist’s career and creative process.
Join us for a dynamic afternoon of talks followed by Q&A.
Master Drawings Symposium celebrates winners of its Ricciardi Prize. Learn more about the prize and the past winners here.
This event is organized by The Drawing Foundation in partnership with Master Drawings, and in association with Master Drawings New York 2025. The Symposium is made possible through the generous support of the Tavolozza Foundation.
Image: Pieter Holsteyn II (1614-1673), Blue rhinoceros beetle, chestnut weevil, and wasp, ca 1650-1660. Gouache and watercolor. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Catherine G. Curran, 2008.
