In Conversation with Dr. Sonia Del Re: The Intimate Life of Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery of Canada
In this conversation, I speak with Dr. Sonia Del Re, Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery of Canada.
CiTR 101.9 FM / The Blue Hour
Prerecorded on July 9, 2026
You can listen to the episode on CiTR.
The Blue Hour, hosted by Farha Guerrero, airs live every Tuesday at 2 p.m. on CiTR 101.9 FM in Vancouver and at citr.ca.
Sonia Del Re holds a Master’s degree in Museology and a PhD in Art History. She first interned at the National Gallery of Canada in 2004–05 and officially joined its curatorial team in 2006.
Today, she oversees a remarkable collection of more than 27,000 works of art on paper, created around the world between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries.
Her curatorial work spans Dutch landscapes, the Carracci, Chagall, Pre-Raphaelite drawings, Picasso’s Vollard Suite, Venetian portraiture, early European monsters, and, most recently, Gathered Leaves: Discoveries from the Drawings Vault.
In our conversation, we speak about drawings, prints, the life of the vault, curatorial research, and what works on paper can reveal about artists, history, and the intimate life of images.
Transcript
Transcript lightly edited for clarity while preserving the natural rhythm of the live conversation.
Farha: I would like to begin with the continuity between your academic life and your curatorial life. Your doctoral research was on Utrecht Caravaggism, Caravaggio, and prints made after paintings. Now, years later, you oversee about 30,000 works on paper at the National Gallery of Canada, spanning from the 15th century to the contemporary period. Do you ever think about how close your current work is to the world that you studied as a scholar?
Sonia: I do because it all makes a lot of sense when you think about it. When I came to study art history at McGill University, I knew I was interested in Caravaggio, but of course so much had been written about that artist in particular and I was looking for something that was less researched where I could make a contribution to the field and the Utrecht Caravaggisti were these three Dutch men who went to Rome and then eventually imported Caravaggio's style back to the Netherlands.
And out of their work came a series of prints which is really unusual in Caravaggism because with Caravaggio a lot of the scenes are night scenes and night scenes are particularly difficult to translate into print because that would mean working a plate of metal over and over again in order to achieve really dark tones.
So I came upon this series of prints that was rare in the Caravaggisti corpus and at the same time I began working at the National Gallery of Canada and was introduced to the fabulous world of prints and drawings.
So the two evolved in parallel, eventually, my knowledge and what I was gaining at the Gallery really helped me consolidate what I wanted to say about these prints in my dissertation.
Farha: Yes. What is interesting is that, in your field, you continue to look at prints in many different forms and from many different periods. Something you studied at university remains very much a part of your life today.
Sonia: Absolutely. I think that is not so unusual for curators. Curators who look after historical art tend to be highly specialized, and then hopefully you find a position in that specific field.
It is nevertheless a huge privilege to be able to do that. When I think back to that young student and what it meant to go into art history, coming from a family of immigrants and parents who did not have a chance to go to school, art history was quite abstract. I was never taken to museums as a child. I went into it not knowing where I would land, and I am so grateful that I am now at the head of the most significant collection of works on paper in the country.
Farha: I had the privilege of visiting you this past spring at the National Gallery, and I am very grateful for that trip. My husband and I were able to see this extraordinary place devouted art that I had never visited before.
It is very special in our country, and I can now say that it is a great place for anyone, Canadian or from outside Canada, to visit.
Your office is already in this amazing Gallery, but it is also very strategically located. I was thinking of an analogy with a scientist, perhaps a marine biologist who works at a university but goes out to sea in the spring to do fieldwork.
In your case, your office is very close to the drawings vault, where thousands of very fragile and protected works on paper are kept. What feels to me like your field site is also the place where your scholarship comes alive, where you are able to handle these works yourself.
Sonia: Indeed. It really is a privilege and quite a difference from the experience of other curators in the museum world. Typically, a vault might be in the basement or quite far from the offices, whereas the Prints and Drawings vaults at the National Gallery of Canada are located in the area where I work.
All I have to do is take two steps and I am inside the vaults, where I can hold in my hands the work of Picasso, Chagall, Rembrandt, or Dürer.
That is what I think is different about being a curator of works on paper, as opposed to paintings or sculpture. With paintings or sculpture, even as a museum visitor, you usually stand back to appreciate the artwork fully. With works on paper, you want to get very close and intimate. There is nothing like holding a work in your hands so that you can examine it closely and look at the mark-making, the signatures, and anything on the paper that might signal something about the history of the piece, such as collectors' marks.
Believe it or not, past owners would stamp artworks to signal their ownership. That is an everyday privilege to hold and look at these things up close, without glass in front of them. I can see the naked paper. That is a very different experience from viewing things on the walls of museums, and that access is what makes my job exciting on a daily basis.
Farha: That is the passion you clearly have, and I certainly felt it when we met in person.
My relationship to your work actually began as a docent, when I had the privilege of giving tours at the Audain Art Museum in Whistler of one of your most recent exhibitions, Gathered Leaves.
It included prints and drawings spanning centuries, mostly European art but also North American art. It was an extraordinary privilege to speak about the art and some of those major names you mentioned, although you get to see them all the time.
But let's back up a little, because the vault is a very controlled environment. It is not a place that anyone can simply enter, and temperature control is especially important. We are looking at very fragile works. There are the various types of paper made over the centuries, as well as materials such as parchment or vellum. Then there are the media—ink, chalk, pastel, watercolour, and graphite. These are fragile and require particular storage. Can you give us a glimpse of what the vault looks like and what you see there?
Sonia: The reason all these objects are kept together is that paper behaves very differently from canvas or materials used for sculpture.
It is fragile not only because it can be torn easily, but also because paper can fade or discolour very quickly when it is over-exhibited. Museums of our size tend to have sizeable collections of works on paper so that the works can be continually rotated in the galleries.
There is no such thing as a permanent display for works on paper. You cannot leave a work on paper on permanent display. Even at home, the ink or other materials will eventually fade, or the paper will yellow.
You will see the damage caused by time and light. That is why everything on paper is usually kept together in the same vault in a larger museum. It also means that you need a specialized curator to look after these works. That is very different from the way other collections might be organized.
In other collections, you might have a curator of Canadian or European art, so the collection is divided according to where the artworks come from rather than what they are made of.
It is an interesting field because your expertise is not based on an area of the globe or a period in time. You have to know a little bit of everything, but primarily you have to know your material.
Paper is both a common commodity of everyday life and something artists have used from very early on. It is fragile but also very resilient, which explains why we have artworks on paper in the collection that have survived for over five centuries.
What always interests me is knowing that, if I am holding a piece of art made on paper 500 years ago, a whole succession of people before me cared for that little piece of paper. Either that, or it was completely forgotten somewhere and preserved in that way. Most of the time, these works survived because people looked after them and preserved them in drawers or albums.
One question we often receive as curators of works on paper is: why were these collected? When we go to museums, we tend to see paintings and sculpture, but who could afford paintings and sculptures 300 or 400 years ago? Not many people.
Collectors who were interested in art but could not afford larger artworks might have decided to collect works on paper. That is how the field took shape. It is distinct for that reason.
In that sense, it is similar to photography. Photography has a much shorter history, because of when it was invented, but photographs are also typically on paper. They are kept in the same vault and looked after by people who specialize in photography, rather than within a specific school or period.
That is what makes the field even richer because you have to be highly specialized in works on paper, yet you also have to be a generalist and, in my case, cover 500 years of history and many continents.
To return to your initial question, The works are usually matted and then placed in boxes containing about a dozen artworks. The boxes are then stored on rolling shelves. It is not a vault filled with thousands of framed things. Most works are unframed and kept in simple mats, so you can hold them in your hands and study them up close.
The way they are stored is conducive to study. You are not standing face to face with a large framed work. Most of the time, you are holding something in your hands or looking at it on the table in front of you, and that allows an intimate connection to the artwork.
I do not know how much more I can explain the vault without an image of it. Vaults are mysterious places because museums do not advertise what they look like or where they are within the building, for obvious reasons.
I hope that Gathered Leaves conveyed some of the types of objects we have in the vault, the research we can do on them, and what we can discover, because with 30,000 works in a vault, you never run out of things to discover.
Farha: And there is an emotional side to this. At the end of my tours during Gathered Leaves, I would tell my guests that much of what we had just witnessed would eventually have to get its beauty sleep again. Back to the vaults for maybe years.
Works on paper can be shown only for a limited time. What was also interesting about the exhibition, and I am sure this is true of many exhibitions you curate, is that something may have come out of the vault and been shown to the public for the first time.
Because of this, guests on my tours often felt that they were witnessing something quite special.
Sonia: I am so glad that came through, because one of the key effects we wanted to convey with Gathered Leaves was the feeling that we were almost bringing people into our vault and giving them a chance to view these works.
It was a unique opportunity because many of them will not be seen again for at least another decade. That makes the exhibition special. It may be the only moment when you can see, for instance, that particular Kandinsky that we had just purchased.
But it also means that, because works on paper are not large or complex objects, they can travel fairly easily. People could see the exhibition in Ottawa, but we were also able to bring it to Whistler, and it will open at The Rooms in St. John's in September.
Works on paper can be shown only for a certain amount of time, usually ten to twelve months, followed by five to ten years of rest, depending on the work.
If an exhibition is in Ottawa for three or four months, it can then be shown elsewhere for another three or four months. Having three or four venues is wonderful for Canadians, because they can experience an exhibition organized by the National Gallery of Canada with works that usually reside in Ottawa.
Then there is always the catalogue, which is the afterlife of an exhibition. Part of the purpose of exhibitions is to publish artworks that are usually kept in vaults and not seen publicly. The catalogue is what remains afterward. It keeps the exhibition alive in perpetuity, in a sense, because it represents the state of the research at the time of the exhibition.
Farha: I want to touch on the fact that works on paper were often preparatory sketches. As a writer, I see them as a kind of draft. There is a fluidity and freedom in them.
Because a drawing is not necessarily the final work, it can feel as though you are entering the artist's mind and seeing what the artist was discovering. A final oil painting might have to adhere to certain expectations, just as a writer has to consider the expectations of publication, or an artist wanting to exhibit at a Salon. In a drawing, you can see another side of the artist.
That may help explain why someone preserved those little works on paper for five centuries.
Some of the works in Gathered Leaves were very small. There were also large watercolours, almost the size of large paintings.
Sonia: I think you have pinpointed something especially stimulating about working with works on paper: drawings have many functions.
You first spoke about drafting or sketching, which allows you to enter an artist's mind. In Italian art history, this is called the primo pensiero, the first thought. Drawing is connected to that idea, and for a scholar of drawings it has a great aura. You experience the artist's hand. You can see the movement of chalk on paper. You may not get the same feeling from a painting.
Paintings are polished and made under very different circumstances. The primo pensiero is a crucial aspect of drawing, but drawings have many other functions. In Gathered Leaves, you saw not only very sketchy works, or primi pensieri, but also highly finished works that would have been sold as decorative works in their own right.
Farha: That is right.
Sonia: With someone like Rosalba Carriera, the medium of drawing becomes especially interesting. She was a portrait painter in eighteenth-century Venice and is recognized as the artist who put pastel on the map as an artistic medium. There was also a very practical reason she chose pastel and paper.
She made portraits mostly of tourists who came through Venice and wanted their portrait made by a famous portraitist. A traveller might not have the luxury of sitting for months in front of an artist. Pastel enabled her to create highly finished and polished portraits in a short time. She did not have to wait for paint to dry in between sittings. She could complete the work in one or two sessions, and the sitter could leave with it and return to their city of origin.
That function of drawing says a lot about the art market and about art history in Venice. These are the fascinating pieces of information that I love about drawing.
It is a highly specialized field, but you gain a broad perspective on history in general by studying drawing.
You mentioned the large watercolours in Gathered Leaves. Two were made by Robert Duncanson, the first African American painter to achieve an international reputation in the nineteenth century. He came to Canada and helped establish a distinctly Canadian landscape tradition.
He was known for paintings in the United States, but the only two watercolours known to be by him are the ones in Gathered Leaves. That tells us something about his patrons in Montreal and what he was trying to do. He was appealing to patrons he had not known before. He offered paintings at one price and watercolours at a fraction of that price.
In Gathered Leaves, we displayed a handwritten invoice by Duncanson showing the difference in price between a painting and a watercolour. If I remember correctly, the watercolour was $80, which was still a substantial amount at the time but quite small in comparison with the painting. Paper allowed him to reach a different market.
That is one of the strengths of an exhibition like Gathered Leaves. It is not focused on a single function, such as preparatory drawings or highly finished works. It displays a variety of functions which gives people a broader sense of what a drawing is.
It also encourages people to think of drawing as the first art form we often encounter as children. Drawing is universal. It is often the first thing we create as young artists - pen to paper, or whatever it may be. Yet we do not always think of it as art.
We often first think of painting and sculpture, but before you have a painting or a sculpture, you have to draw.
We return to the primo pensiero because it is that immediate connection to the artist and their mark-making on a piece of paper. People might wonder what value that has, but a recent Michelangelo drawing sold for, I think, $27 million. It was a drawing of a foot on a tiny piece of paper. The appeal of having access to the artist's hand is extraordinary.
Farha: Everyone is drawn to particular works, and I had my favourites in that exhibition. I had seen Goya at the Prado in Madrid - Goya the painter, the monumental painter. Then, in your exhibition, there were these little drawings by him.
But I could see and feel Goya in those small drawings.
Sonia: I think the smaller format and immediacy of these things were brought to the fore by the stories we were able to tell in Gathered Leaves. The four Goya sheets came from specific sketchbooks from late in his life, a period that is well documented.
Each sheet represented events that might have happened during his lifetime. We were able to identify one subject much more clearly. It had been known as a representation of a criminal being killed, but we were able to determine who the criminal was and what happened to him.
Goya was documenting history as it was happening. What is great about a show like this is that you can tell the artist's story and the story being told through the drawings.
These were little sketches that Goya held in his hand and made fairly quickly and inconspicuously. These were meant for his personal sketchbooks, and not to be displayed on walls.
You were saying earlier that it is a privilege to see these things out of the vault, but many of the artists probably did not intend for these works to be seen by the public.
Farha: That makes the experience even more appealing. Visitors felt more privileged because the artists may not have wanted the works to be seen, and yet we can see them centuries later.
Let us move into the gallery space itself. Before we came on air, we were discussing the idea that a curator acts in a creative spirit. When a museum or art gallery presents an exhibition, there is a feeling beyond the artworks themselves. It comes from how the art is structured - chronologically, thematically, or in some other way.
In Gathered Leaves, many women artists were, in a sense, unearthed from the centuries. Some may not have been well known even during their own time.
How do you think about these decisions after curating so many exhibitions over the years?
There are also the didactics, because sometimes you have only about 60 words to describe something like the story you just told about Goya.
Sonia: Yes. It is a difficult process to explain because every exhibition is different. If you are putting together an exhibition of Picasso's suite of 100 prints, created over a short period of time, the works follow one another and the subjects are similar. Not much interpretation is needed.
Gathered Leaves was another matter. We were dealing with 500 years of history and artists from all over the map. Making sense of that was a challenge, because the common thread was that the works had either never been seen or we had discovered something new about them.
How do you make themes out of that? We also did not want to present the exhibition like an art history course. We wanted people to enjoy the artworks for what they were - to stand, take them in, and enjoy them.
Each section had its own character. Some were based on the media, like the pastel room. Others were based on subject matter, like the landscape room.
There was also a room on the Pre-Raphaelites. It was very diverse. The storytelling, The stories woven within each theme and from one theme to another guide the visitor through the space, and this is what makes the exhibition memorable. There is no secret solution. It depends on each subject.
Adapting an exhibition to different venues is an additional complication, but a fun one. In St. John's, the exhibition will look very different from the way it looked in Ottawa or Whistler. An entire section is no longer there, and other things have been moved around.
What needs to be preserved, in my view, are the stories. If you can still tell a story, that is the important part. People may not remember exactly what the exhibition physically looked like or every individual artwork, but they will remember the stories woven through it.
Farha: Those are decisions you make in response to the architectural space and the constraints of each venue.
There is also a whole team beyond the curator, including the people who transport the works. Kiriko, the Chief curator at the Audain Art Museum, explained that a special truck had to transport one beautiful framed work. The frame and the art were almost an object in themselves, and the glass was extremely delicate. It had to be displayed in a glass case and transported with meticulous care.
Sonia: That is an artwork, in fact, that I did not imagine travelling when I first acquired it. It is an eighteenth-century work made in Lyon by Jean-Jacques de Boissieu. It remains in its original eighteenth-century frame and glass, making it a very special object through which I was able to pinpoint the connections between the artist, the collector for whom it was made, and the framer who produced the frame and glass.
The glass was painted to create a false decorative border. The original backing remains on the frame, along with the original framer's label advertising the products available to collectors of art.
When I acquired it, I thought it could never move from the Gallery. Then I spoke with our paper conservator, Ainsley, who said, 'We should not dismiss it right away. We should try and see what we can come up with.' They found a way to transport and display it securely. It adds something to the exhibition because it is a unique object and highlights an artist who is not well known by the public today, although he was recognized and collected during his lifetime.
His collectors clearly put a great deal of time, effort, and money into framing these works, as visitors could see in the exhibition.
Although exhibitions of works on paper can sometimes travel easily, certain works, including this one and pastels, are difficult to move. Pastel can come off the paper, so those works have to travel flat. Every work on paper has its own particular requirements based on the materials. It takes a whole team to plan how the objects will be crated, what kind of truck is needed, and who needs to be there when they are installed. It is a complex undertaking.
Farha: Yes, and for good reason. It returns us to the word fragility. These are fragile works, and we want them to continue surviving for centuries.
All those people behind the scenes are part of that. It also occurred to me that, when you begin thinking about the next exhibition, the work is similar to your scholarly work. You may have to undertake several years of research before anything comes out.
The public may not think about that when they enter a gallery or museum and see a special exhibition. It is a labour of love that takes several years and involves many people. Can you speak about that?
Sonia: One thing I would say first is that, when a project has just come out, the curator is often already thinking about the next one. You are presenting and promoting a new project, but in your mind you are already elsewhere, because these projects take years to put together. I am currently working on two new exhibition projects. One involves building a new collection that I will then unveil in an exhibition.
Farha: So you're acquiring these pieces.
Sonia: I am acquiring pieces, and I am also working with a private collector who has been collecting in that area, so we have a good base to work with.
The collection I am building consists of works by early women printmakers - by early, I mean pre-1800. We are not speaking of Mary Cassatt, for instance, but of women whose names are virtually unknown today.
It requires a great deal of digging and original research because some of these artists do not even have biographies. It is a 'package deal', in a sense, because I am building the collection and preparing the exhibition at the same time. The difficulties are multiplied because I am searching for objects on the market rather than in other museums.
If you were organizing an exhibition with loans from other museums, you would speak to colleagues and ask whether they could lend this or that. With this project, I am working with whatever is on the market and trying to source works that I can purchase for the Gallery. And those works will become the basis of the exhibition.
The project is consuming me right now, but it is also delightful because early women printmakers are not well researched, and relatively little has been published about them. There is still so much work to be done, which means there is an opportunity for the National Gallery of Canada to make its mark in the print field by finding and researching these women and giving them their rightful place in art history.
I am very excited about this specific project. I have already made several discoveries, and I hope the exhibition may also travel internationally. These women artists, forgotten today, deserve to be rediscovered.
Farha: Absolutely. That was something I felt very strongly in Gathered Leaves, and so did the visitors. Many said they had never heard of these women artists or known their names, but they were intrigued and wanted to learn more. You can see how important this work is.
There is also an interesting element in the founding of the Prints and Drawings Department at the National Gallery. We are approaching a century in which women, including women like you, have overseen this extraordinary collection. Can you speak about some of the great women who preceded you and about your colleagues today?
Sonia: Absolutely. I'm really happy you're asking that question because the history of prints and drawings at the National Gallery is really fascinating in that we were the very first curatorial division ever created at the National Gallery of Canada.
Farha: Wow.
Sonia: When the position was posted in 1921, it was advertised as a kind of second-in-command - someone who could represent the National Gallery when the director or board members were not available. It took some years to find the right person.
In 1928, the National Gallery hired Kathleen M. Fenwick, an English woman who has been hailed as the first woman curator in Canada. That is very special. She may have been hired simply to help the Gallery gain control of things for a few years, but she remained for 40 years and built an extraordinary collection. She became an important figure in the world of prints and drawings in Canada. In the year of her retirement, I believe it was 1968, she received the Order of Canada for her professional accomplishments.
Her successor, Mimi Cazort, continued that rigorous work through a career of about 30 years at the National Gallery of Canada. Today, Kirsten and I, along with my colleague Christine Lalonde, who looks after Canadian prints and drawings, form an all-women team. Kathleen Fenwick and Mimi Cazort left us an extraordinary legacy, and we are very proud to continue it.
Farha: Sonia, I am afraid we are almost out of time.
It was a real privilege to come to Ottawa, to meet you, and to have this conversation. It is what you do that makes the visitor experience so special. An academic can conduct research and publish papers, but when you enter a public space as an academic, you have the privilege of connecting with the members of the public who come into the Gallery.
A single work of art can have an extraordinary impact. I have had people cry on tours. Art is very emotional. The work you do is special, and I want to thank you both as a docent and as a visitor to the Gallery. For anyone listening, visit the National Gallery of Canada!
Sonia: This is a good opportunity to remind Canadians that this is their collection - the national collection. Thank you for your kind words, Farha.
What I do is especially meaningful because it is for Canadians. I consider myself a public servant, and I am here to serve Canadians by curating their national collection of works on paper. Thank you very much for this opportunity and for being so encouraging and passionate about what we do.
Farha: Thank you, Sonia.
Sonia: Thank you, Farha.
And now, as Gathered Leaves continues its journey, the exhibition will be on display at The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, from September 19, 2026, to January 3, 2027.