Rebecca Long blogs about a new gallery installation highlighting 18th-century painted sketches at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Long observes: "One of the great artistic achievements of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the proliferation of monumental paintings for the walls and ceilings of churches and palaces throughout Europe… These large, often figure-filled compositions were the result of careful processes of visual planning, in which reduced-scale sketches painted in oil played an important role. Most painted sketches were never intended to be displayed publicly, but rather were made as tools in the creative process… With their fluid brushwork, abbreviated handling, and intimate scale, painted sketches are often more vibrant than finished full-scale paintings."