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Rousseau depicts the transitional space between a wood and a sunny clearing—a motif he often revisited in his late work. Through swift hatching and short flecks of the pencil, he creates a texture of lush vegetation and evokes the play of light and shadow across the scene. As a leader of the Barbizon school of artists, Rousseau advocated sketching en plein air, and the present sheet, though remarkably detailed, may have been finished entirely outdoors.

With economical touches of the pen and brush, the Venetian artist Giovanni Battista Tiepolo—a master of the ink medium—deftly conveys this standing male figure's form, features, and placement in space. The work most likely belongs to a series of drawings of clothed figures known as the Sole Figure Vestite, which the artist produced for reference, experimentation, and the demonstration of his virtuosic technique.

The unseated horseman ensnared by a monstrous serpent is the hero Siegfried of the Niebelungenlied, a medieval German epic poem that provided rich source material for the Swiss-born Fuseli. Dynamic, twisted forms, energetic pen lines, and dramatic shadows in wash emphasize the intensity of the struggle. Another ink drawing on the reverse of this sheet, which has partially bled through to the front, depicts the biblical figure Job tormented by Satan.

In this study for an unrealized painting, Wilkie—best known for his history subjects—dramatizes the 1652 burial of Scottish royal treasure for safeguarding from Oliver Cromwell's forces. The unfinished state of the drawing heightens the visibility of Wilkie's rapid yet highly descriptive use of line, shadow, and highlight, while also augmenting the suspense of the narrative, which ends at a pregnant moment beside the void of the sheet at left.

Charles Ryskamp was instrumental in bringing this pair of oil sketches into the permanent collection in 2000. The works belong to a group of plein-air studies of clouds painted by Constable over a series of summers in Hampstead, an area in north London. These spontaneous yet keenly observed views of atmospheric conditions, here ranging from calm to threatening, informed the artist's highly finished studio paintings, such as Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Garden (1826), on view in the Library.