This catalogue is the first publication of all the Neapolitan drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen.

These drawings have previously only been known to a small group of specialists, whose curiosity was piqued by the fact that most of them supposedly belonged to the Neapolitan painter Francesco Solimena. That supposition can now be refuted. It turns out instead that the collection was part of a much larger one that can be traced back to Naples at the end of the eighteenth century, from which other sheets are now in some of the leading public collections in New York, Washington, Vienna, London, Paris, Oslo and elsewhere.