The French drawings of the Department of Prints, Drawings and Photographs - for instance the work by Gaspard Dughet - were likewise already among the works in the collection of the Königliches Kupferstichkabinett (Royal Collection of Copper Engravings). A large proportion of them previously belonged to the French painter Nicolas Guibal. In his function as a court painter at the palaces of Stuttgart, Ludwigsburg and elsewhere and as a teacher at the Hohe Carlsschule (as the university of Stuttgart was called), Guibal exerted decisive influence on the stylistic movement known as »Swabian Classicism.« The drawings by François Desportes, Jean Restout, Michel-François Dandré-Bardon and Charles Natoire, for example, were all originally in Guibal’s collection. The majority of the drawings left behind by Guibal himself are also in the Department of Prints, Drawings and Photographs. Preparations are presently under way for the publication of an inventory catalogue.

The collection of French prints predating 1800 – like that of Italian graphic art of the same period – has its origins primarily in the Königliches Kupferstichkabinett, the royal engravings collection. Apart from a large inventory of portrait engravings by Robert Nanteuil, the focus of the holdings lies on the reproduction/interpretation graphics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Acquisitions of the past decades, e.g. works by Jean Duvet, Jacques Callot and Jean François Janinet enhance the collection superbly.