The collecting of drawings was long the province of artists themselves. The Florentine Vasari formed one of the first sizable and systematic collections of drawings, and his example was followed by Rembrandt, Rubens, Lely, Reynolds, and Lawrence. Great European museums—the Uffizi, the Louvre, the Berlin Museum, and the British Museum—have old and important collections of drawings. In America public interest in drawings is a fairly recent development our public collections have short histories. That of the Metropolitan Museum is one of the oldest in the country, and this is due to the foresight of Cornelius Vanderbilt.