Image: Getty Villa, Los Angeles
The Getty Museum has acquired six drawings at auction, expanding its holdings with works by Odilon Redon, Edward Burne-Jones, John Linnell, Annibale Carracci, Baccio Bandinelli and Domenico Campagnola. In a behind-the-scenes account published by senior curator Julian Brooks, the museum said the purchases were made from Sotheby’s sale of drawings from the collection of New Yorker Diane Nixon in early February.
The acquisitions matter because they reflect how the Getty builds a public collection through the competitive auction market. Brooks described the process as a long one: museum staff study potential purchases well in advance, research provenance and exhibition history, and prepare reports explaining how each work would fit the collection and serve audiences. Those reports are reviewed by museum leadership, registrars and lawyers before bidding begins. The museum said that, by the end of the sale, it had secured six drawings, while other lots went to higher bidders.
The new works span more than three centuries of European drawing, giving the Getty material that broadens both its chronological range and its ability to tell connected art-historical stories. Among the acquisitions is an Odilon Redon head in profile that Brooks said will appear in the museum’s forthcoming exhibition Odilon Redon: Otherworldly Visions, opening July 14. Also acquired is Edward Burne-Jones’s Phineus and His Courtiers Turned to Stone, a drawing related to the Perseus myth, alongside John Linnell’s A Farmhouse at Shoreham, purchased with funds from the Disegno Group, which supports departmental acquisitions.
The group also includes Annibale Carracci’s Study of a Tree, described by Brooks as an “astonishing” full-sheet portrait of a tree; Baccio Bandinelli’s The Descent from the Cross, a design for a bronze relief for Emperor Charles V; and Domenico Campagnola’s Landscape with a Fortified Town and Rising Sun. The range of media and subject matter underscores the Getty’s emphasis on drawing as a field that links study, invention, and finished design across periods and regions.
Brooks noted that the works have already arrived at the museum and will be integrated into the Getty’s display schedule. Some will appear in the summer rotation of drawings in the museum’s new acquisitions gallery, which opens June 30, while the rest are set to go on view in the fall beginning November 3. The museum also said its drawings collection is available through exhibitions, a dedicated new acquisitions gallery, high-resolution images online, and by appointment in the study room.
For the Getty, the auction buy is significant not only as a collection update but as a reminder of how major museums bring works from private hands into public view. In a field where access to drawings is often limited, the acquisitions strengthen the museum’s ability to show how artists across the centuries used paper for myth, landscape, portraiture and design. The purchase also highlights the continuing role of auctions as a key route for institutions to fill gaps and deepen the historical scope of their collections.
