The Old Master drawings collected by Frits Lugt, then by the successive directors of the Fondation Custodia, constitute one of the largest collections of drawings in private hands, in number and in quality. Frits Lugt focused particularly on Dutch and Flemish drawings (fifteenth to eighteenth centuries), Italian (fifteenth to eighteenth centuries) and French (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). His intimate familiarity with the art market of the day, combined with his encyclopaedic knowledge, gave him access to some exceptional works.

The quality of the collection of Dutch drawings of the Golden Age is unrivalled anywhere in France; it provides a very complete overview of the art of drawing in the Northern Netherlands. At the centre of the collection are no less than twenty-one drawings by Rembrandt, an artist particularly close to Frits Lugt’s heart and one whose work he had studied in depth. As a collector, Lugt did not only favour Dutch artists of the seventeenth century, he also owned some important drawings from the century before (Maarten van Heemskerck, Lucas van Leyden, Hendrick Goltzius…).

The group of Flemish drawings is equally comprehensive: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are represented by their greatest exponents, from Gossaert (known as Mabuse) to Pieter Bruegel the Elder and his son Jan (known as Velvet Bruegel): the seventeenth century is present with more than thirty major sheets by Rubens, Van Dyck and Jordaens; alongside this nucleus can be found work by the great Flemish landscape painters, portrait painters and history painters of the period.

The collections of Italian and French drawings, although a little less extensive, are no less important. Lugt assembled work by first-rank artists from all the great Italian centres of art, dating from the Renaissance to the Settecento (Stefano da Verona, Leonardo da Vinci, Andrea del Sarto, Federico Barocci, Guercino, the Tiepolo family). From France, Claude Lorrain, Watteau, Fragonard, Boucher, Hubert Robert, Greuze…

In addition to these four main schools of drawings, Lugt was also interested in the art of England, Germany and Spain, building significant stocks which include a number of remarkable works (Bonington, Dürer, Ribera…).

Inspired by Rembrandt’s drawings from Indian miniatures, Lugt also began making a collection of these. The collection has been considerably enlarged since his death and now constitutes one of the most important collections of Indian miniatures in France (after those in the Musée Guimet and the Bibliothèque nationale de France).