Executed En Masse: Early Modern Portrait Prints at the National Gallery of Art

Lara Langer, 2019 Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow In 1943 Lessing J. Rosenwald gifted roughly 6,000 works on paper to the nascent National Gallery of Art. By the time of his death in 1979, his collection had grown to over 28,000, including nearly 2,400 early modern portrait prints representing Europe’s major leaders, artists, and thinkers. On November 25, 2019, as part of the Works in Progress series at the National Gallery of Art, Lara Langer looks at several examples from the Rosenwald collection while discussing the history of collecting portrait prints and their importance in the development of portraiture.