How flabby our ideas of draughtsmanship have become

The term drawing is a broad umbrella, so in an exhibition of 120 works it helps to outline some distinctions. A good place to start is to ask what drawings are for, and that is what Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum has done with its current show of sketches by Flemish masters – staged in collaboration with Antwerp’s Museum Plantin-Moretus – dividing them into studies, designs and stand-alone finished works.

If you’ve ever had the chance to visit it, you’ll know what a special place the Plantin-Moretus is. Still occupying the original premises in which it was founded as a printworks in the 16th century, it sits on a hoard of drawings by the great names of Flemish art dating back to a time when Antwerp was at the centre of a booming trade in prints, metalwork, stained glass and tapestry, all of which began with drawings on paper.