Item by luminous, brain-zapping item, “Drawn to Greatness: Master Drawings From the Thaw Collection” at the Morgan Library & Museum has to be one of the paramount group drawing shows of the era. It is also a grand summing-up of a career, an art form and an institution’s holdings.

During the past 60 years, the New York art dealer Eugene V. Thaw and his wife, Clare Eddy Thaw, gradually amassed a phenomenal drawing collection, notable not just for visual charisma, but also for chronological breadth, running from the early Renaissance to the near present, with lingering stops en route.

In 1975, the couple promised the still-growing collection to the Morgan. Earlier this year, they formally gave it more than 400 items, as a gift outright, one that the museum is calling transformative. The present show, a celebration of proprietary welcome and thanks, coincides with Mr. Thaw’s 90th birthday. (Clare Thaw died, at 93, this past summer.)