These drawings come from the collections of the former Musée des Beaux-Arts de Mulhouse, then administered by the Société Industrielle de Mulhouse. At the start of the war, the Museum's most precious pieces were packed up in the haste imposed by events, and taken to a region thought to be safe from military operations. The explosion that destroyed the Riedisheim bridge in 1940 and the bombing raids on the town in 1944 caused serious damage to the Museum and the objects that had remained there.
Sheltered from the bombardments of the Second World War along with the Museum's most precious items, the collection of around 180 drawings dating from the 16th to the end of the 19th century, purchased in their time by industrialists from Mulhouse or donated to the Société Industrielle by artists, was only rediscovered in the early 1970s. The collection was then entrusted to the Bibliothèque municipale, which had already received the Société Industrielle's collection of engravings and lithographs (including over 150 prints by Hans Thoma) in 1968.
The rediscovered collection comprises about 180 drawings, which were selected and purchased at the time by Charles Steinbach of Mulhouse and Deglatigny of Rouen. It includes works by Italian and French artists such as David, Callot, and Géricault. There is also a series of drawings by Jean-Jacques Henner (see above, La Liseuse/The Reader) and works by lesser-known but technically and regionally interesting local artists, such as drawings by Benjamin Ullmann, a native of Blotzheim (see opposite, Temple d'Hercule à Agrigente).
These drawings were all digitised in 2022 and are now available online on website of the Bibliothèques municipales de Mulhouse.
