Claude Lorrain, The Disembarkation of Aeneas and his Companions in Latium (1640-1650), pen and brown ink and brown wash with white pink highlights on brown paper. (Photo courtesy of Paris, École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, EBA 937)

This exquisite exhibition of drawings continues through December 1 and provides an opportunity to look at art in a very special way. Here we learn much about artistic process, since no drawing stands alone; nearly all were made in preparation for paintings.

The show, titled "Poussin, Claude, and their World: Seventeenth-Century French Drawings from the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris," is divided into three basic sections: downstairs to the left, Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) and other academic painters predominate; to the right, Claude Lorrain (c. 1604/05-1682) and artists who employed more poetic license to exaggerate effects of light and naturalism are emphasized. This was during the era before Louis XIV.

Upstairs, a small room gives a glimpse of art during the reign of Louis XIV and the centralization of Versailles. Here we see clearly the continuity of development from the two poles represented by Poussin and Claude. Charles LeBrun's (1619-1690) preparatory study for a stone thrower in a painting of the Martyrdom of Saint Stephen is the most fascinating drawing in the room. LeBrun is known for his numerous studies of facial expressions, in his quest to show visual equivalents for states of mind. Here he seeks to show a face filled with emotions of both hate and resolution.

Simon Vouet, Draped Woman, Full-length, Leaning to the Left (late 1630s), black chalk with white highlights on brown paper. (Photo courtesy of Paris, École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, Mas 1282)

Poussin's 10 drawings vary from the highly worked-through pen-and-ink of Salome Receiving the Head of John the Baptist (from the mid-1640s) to a study from nature called A Fortified Castle (late 1640s or early 1650s). In Salome the artist uses restraint rather than the usual blood and gore, stressing gesture over facial expression. So eloquent and simple it is nearly abstract, the drawing corroborates Poussin's claim that he based many of his compositions on modes in music. In the second drawing, it looks as if the red chalk, pen, and brown ink were breathed onto the paper. Another earlier Poussin from about 1635 (Studies of Roman Soldiers, after Bas-Reliefs on Trajan's Columns) is done in a totally different technique from his others—one appropriate for the copying of antiquity, with few shadows, arrested movement, and sharp, almost sculptural lines.

Claude Lorrain's drawings are at the opposite end of the spectrum from Poussin's, though both French artists spent most of their lifetimes in Rome. The Disembarkment of Aeneas and his Companions in Latium is a gorgeous work, looking almost like painting, with the use of white and pink highlights interspersed between the pen and brown ink wash on brown paper. In this fine example of his fidelity to naturalism and modern ideas, Claude actually depicts masts of contemporary 17th-century French ships, rather than Roman ones, as Poussin would have done. Nearly 200 years later, Turner would take this kind of work as a model and a challenge. In Claude's preparatory drawings of trees and landscapes, we also see foliage that clearly presages that of the Rococo and later Constable and Impressionist paintings.

The rest of the exhibition deals with lesser known contemporaries or followers of either Poussin or Claude. Simon Vouet (1590-1649)—a predecessor, and official "First Painter to the King" (Louis XIII)—is one such artist, represented by several portraits, some of human countenances and some of drapery. For example, in the Portrait of a Man, Front View (1625), we see a man so idiosyncratic and lifelike that we wonder if we know him. In the studies of draped women, however, we are far more intrigued by the choreography of the draperies themselves than the women who wear them. There is also included in the show a more casual, looser portrait—perhaps even a self-portrait of Vouet in his twenties.

Simon Vouet, Portrait of a Man, Front View (c. 1625), black chalk on paper. (Photo courtesy of Paris, École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, Mas 1292)

Eustache LeSueur (1616-1655), known as the "new Raphael," also made drapery studies and is represented by six powerful drawings. Among them, the Male Figure Carrying a Pile of Books (1649) is a study for a figure in a painting of Saint Paul Preaching at Ephesus. He is one of the Jews and Greeks who, converted by St. Paul to Christianity, publicly burn their books. A grim subject, it is nonetheless a magnificent drawing. Two drawings of Muses—the triangle-playing Muse of dance, Terpsichore, and the cello-playing muse of love poetry, Erato—are charming preparatory drawings for decorations appropriately placed in the alcove adjoining the bridal chamber in the Hotel Lambert, on the Île Saint-Louis, Paris.

This is the first time we are privileged to see this magnificent collection in the United States. It gives us an opportunity to observe how painters used drawings as preparations—from squared-off sketches to fragments of drapery studies, body parts, and elements one never gets a chance to see in completed works. There is often a freedom here that is never to be recaptured.

Two outstanding and unusual works in the show are a landscape drawing originally attributed to Poussin, but possessing a spontaneity and graphic flourishes alien to the master's oeuvre, and a fascinating sheet of studies of Twenty-Two Heads of Women, a Young Man, an Abbot, Children and Cherubs (1691) by Michel Corneille, the Younger (1642-1708). This last was a preparatory study for a copy of Mignard's Celestial Glory for the dome of the Val-de-Grace.

If you've never been to the Frick (located at 1 East 70th Street, near Fifth Avenue), allow yourself a long time. It is one of the great museums of the world. Hours are 10 a.m.-6 p.m. on Tuesday through Thursday and on Saturday; 10 a.m.-9 p.m. on Friday; and 1-6 p.m. on Sunday. Admission is $10 ($5 for students and senior citizens).