Print room

A print room is either a room or industrial building where printing takes place, or a room in an art gallery or museum, where a collection of old master and modern prints, usually together with drawings, watercolours and photographs, are held and viewed. The latter meaning is the subject of this article. A further meaning is a room decorated by pasting prints onto the wall in a quasi-collage style to form a sort of wallpaper, an 18th-century fashion, of which several examples survive. One of the largest, though atypically the prints are cut out around shapes, that are pasted well spaced apart, is at The Vyne, Basingstoke, Hampshire.

For conservation reasons works on paper cannot be permanently displayed, as light, temperature and humidity conditions leave them vulnerable to damage, normally limiting an open display to no more than 6 months. They are kept in inert, acid-free boxes, albums or portfolios behind closed doors; which considerations of space would dictate in any case for the vast majority. Where possible, they are mounted on archivally safe supports, but large collections still contain less important items loose in boxes. Storage may be in the same room as the viewing is done (the 'Reading-' or 'Study Room'), but as the largest collections have well over a million items stores are often located 'behind the scenes', along with the curators' offices. Typically, a large print room appears like a library reading room, and the visitor sits at a desk equipped with a stand or easel, fills in a request slip, and the material requested is brought out for them by curatorial staff, who are able to offer further information about works and artists. Visitors are often able to compare a selection of works by different artists, aiding connoisseurial study.

Most national collections can be seen by the public more easily than is often realised. Usually, visitors of all sorts, whether researchers or not, are entitled to view works on paper not on display in the galleries, which will form the great majority of an institution's collection, thereby making print rooms an essential resource for enabling our understanding and appreciation of works on paper - in particular, how artists conceive of finished paintings through preparatory studies, and how printmaking traditions and techniques have evolved over the centuries. On a national level, print rooms tend to differ, each having their own specialism, however collections often overlap in content.

...
Wikipedia