Sketchpad in hand, first-year student Sara Kosoff trades glances with an image of an elegant woman in a hat. With careful strokes, she re-creates the delicate shading of the woman's face, the simple grace of her sleeve, the aloof curve of her body in a chair.

"It's sort of intimidating at first, but you have to let yourself go," said Kosoff, who visited the UC Davis Nelson Gallery with an introductory drawing class taught by lecturer Bryce Vinokurov. "You realize it's just marks on a paper, and no matter how famous the artist is, you're trying to let yourself grow by recreating it."

That artist is James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), an American who spent much of his life in London and Paris, and who is best known for the painting popularly called Whistler's Mother.

Less well known are his lithographs, prints made from the transfer of a crayon drawing onto an absorbent stone. Sixty of Whistler's lithographs now grace the Nelson Gallery as a recent gift of late alumnus Jeffrey Ruesch.

Ruesch entered UC Davis with thoughts of studying medicine or becoming an English literature teacher, but emerged in 1969 with a degree in art history.

Influences of the people he met here, including art professors Richard Nelson and Robert Arneson, changed his life. Ruesch carried his artistic impressions through a doctorate in art history at Columbia University, and later into a career as an art dealer and gallery owner in New York.

He purchased his first Whistler lithograph shortly after graduating from UC Davis, and developed his collection throughout the next 30 years. In 2002, he discussed a plan to eventually donate the prints to his California alma mater.

The decision proved to be a prophetic one. Ruesch became ill and died of complications from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in March 2003, at the age of 55.

Despite his premature death, Ruesch's love of art lives on to inspire a new generation of students. "He wanted the collection to go back to his roots, to his beginnings as an art collector, and that was UC Davis," said Assistant Dean Maureen Miller, who oversaw the acquisition of the prints. "He wanted it to be used as a teaching collection, because he knew how he would have benefited from it as a student."

Today, professors are helping to make the connection between this valuable new resource and their students, both the new and the experienced.

Like Vinokurov, painter and art studio professor David Hollowell gathered his upper division figure drawing class in the Nelson Gallery to observe Whistler's technique. "What is he doing," Hollowell asked as they gather around a single print, "that, if you could grab onto it, would make you have an even greater relationship with drawing, with form?"

A thoughtful discussion followed as students commented on the way Whistler highlighted a figure's face, how he directed the observer's focus, his dynamic variety of lines.

These nuances, said art history professor Jeffrey Ruda, make Whistler's lithographs so difficult to reproduce, even in digital photographs, and so contribute to their obscurity.

"To see this kind of subtlety of both technicality and expression, and how the two work together, is only something you can get by looking at the original," Ruda said.

One look at these originals reveals how Whistler exploited lithography to his advantage — the details of his touch flow across the print, almost revealing the movement of his hand.

Art history professor Dianne Macleod says that the lithographs give students insight into Whistler's artistic process. "There is a real elegance, a beautiful simplicity," Macleod said. "In a painting, color distracts; you're not as conscious of the lines, the lyricism of it."

Indeed, by virtue of a simple line, almost a scribble, Whistler created a sleeve or a staircase, breathes life into a chicken or a tree.

Beyond the monetary value of the 60 prints (which have been individually appraised from several hundred to several thousand dollars), the opportunity for students to experience the craft of a master is Ruesch's real gift to the university.

"It enables students to be in the presence of great art, to see it not on a computer screen or slide," said Renny Pritikin, director of the Nelson Gallery. "We believe that objects have presence, and it is valuable."

Pritikin also said that the current exhibit was arranged as per Whistler's characteristically unconventional tastes. For example, Whistler directed that these particular drawings be exhibited in a gallery with a yellow color scheme and artfully placed blue and white Chinese vases.

The pieces are hung in two rows, with the top and bottom edges aligned, creating uneven wall space between frames of different sizes. The resulting effect provides today's visitor with a pleasingly historic stroll through these images of timeless grace.

The Whistler exhibit runs through March 18. The Nelson Gallery is on the first floor of the Art Building.

Erin Loury is a News Service writing intern.