Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s small “Portrait of Charles-Désiré Norry (1796–1818)” (1817) is a classic Ingres half-length pencil portrait. The sitter’s fully modeled face is softly burnished into smoky, volumetric grays, yet his torso is swiftly delineated in Ingres’s inimitable crystalline line. The 21-year-old Norry, who died a year after the portrait was made, was the eldest son of Charles Norry, and he intended to become, like his father, a celebrated architect. In Ingres’s drawing, Norry, beautiful and cocky, radiates youth and promise, as well as an air of snobbery. His hair looks like wind-swept grass and wild fire, and his sullen mouth lifts off his face like a bird. His eyes are averted and his head shifts subtly between frontal and three-quarter views. And although his shoulders are relaxed, as if he is fully seated, his torso is oddly truncated and his hips lift into a standing position. Norry is obviously proud to have his portrait drawn by Ingres but he is anxious to move on: The artist allows us to engage fully with a sitter who is unable to engage fully with us.

The portrait is one of two Ingres masterpieces among the more than 80 works on paper in the Morgan Library & Museum’s lively exhibit “Tales and Travels: Drawings Recently Acquired on the Sunny Crawford von Bülow Fund.” Arriving in 1977, it was the first work to be donated to the museum by Martha Sharp “Sunny” Crawford von Bülow. The exhibit highlights works recently purchased for the Morgan by Sunny’s daughter, Cosima Pavoncelli, who has managed the collection since 1988. It is the second show to feature the Morgan’s von Bülow collection of prints and drawings.

Sunny von Bülow (b. 1932), the heiress and philanthropist who has been in a coma since 1980, is probably best known as the wife of Claus von Bülow. Mr. von Bülow was convicted, in 1982, of attempting to murder Sunny. The verdict was successfully appealed and the incident was made into the 1990 film “Reversal of Fortune,” starring Glenn Close and Jeremy Irons, who won an Oscar for his portrayal of the aristocratic Claus.

Sunny’s true legacy is on view at the Morgan.

The von Bülows’ own collection of furniture and decorative arts was legendary, and Sunny was long active as a patron of the arts. She purchased objects such as paintings, haute couture, and “The Four Continents,” a set of Beauvais tapestries, for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In terms of works on paper, she seems to have preferred Neoclassical and Rococo French and Italian masters, such as Canaletto, François Boucher, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and Antoine Watteau, all of whom are well represented here. She especially liked drawings depicting landscapes and literary and historical subjects — or “Tales and Travels.”

Jacques-Louis David’s black-and-white chalk drawing of mountains and trees, “An Alpine Landscape With a Horse-Drawn Carriage,” quivers with an Impressionist urgency. So do Canaletto’s “Capriccio With a Round Tower and Ruins by the Lagoon” and Watteau’s roiling, red chalk landscape “River Landscape With a Fortified Town and Distant Mountains.” The Watteau, probably a copy after a drawing by Domenico Campagnola, is the largest known drawing by the artist. Jean-Baptiste Hüet’s “Studies of Corn and Wheat” (c. 1785) imbues botanical specimens with animistic qualities. His son, Nicolas Hüet, the Younger is represented with “Study of the Giraffe Given to Charles X by the Viceroy of Egypt,” (1827) a colorful and whimsical watercolor combining elements of Claude and Henri Rousseau. Fragonard’s red chalk portrait “Seated Young Woman” (1780s) — in which the sitter looks as if, under her great gown, she is dancing on six legs — is ravishing and glistening. And Watteau’s beautifully evocative redand-black chalk drawing “Study of a Shell” (c. 1720) — floral, oral, vaginal, animal — foreshadows and eclipses the work of Georgia O’Keeffe.

The other Ingres drawing on view, “Portrait of a Young Boy” (c. 1793), a tiny tondo in graphite and red-and-green watercolor, was completed when Ingres was a teenager studying with David. Toy-like, the drawing is not much larger than a cameo. Reminiscent of Chardin’s portraits of children, it emits a golden glow and is one of the hallmarks of the show.

Basically, “Tales and Travels” is an exhibit with a little something for nearly everyone. It includes a glittering watercolor and gold “Interior of St. Peter’s: The Portico” by Francesco Panini, Louis-Nicolas de Lespinasse’s quieting “The Presentation of an Ambassador to the Sultan in the Hall of Petitions of the Topkapi Palace, Constantinople, 1790,” and Pier Leone Ghezzi’s encyclopedic-grotesque “Album of Caricatures.”

The von Bülow collection makes for an enchanting museum experience, but, oddly uneven, it is not overrun with masterpieces. That said, even the least accomplished drawings on view have their strange charms. The collection represents an eccentric vision and it continues to take shape as a unique body of works on paper. Comprising three decades of family donations spanning three centuries, it is rich not just in French drawings but also in works by Italian, Dutch, German, British, and Flemish artists. It has, under the guidance of Ms. Pavoncelli, expanded to include a wide variety of artists, such as, most recently, the British painters Samuel Palmer, Richard Westall, Francis Danby, and J.M.W. Turner, whose watercolor “Dartmouth Cove, 1824–27,” packed with drunken sailors, ships, lunging trees, and dignified ladies, ranks up there with the peasant pictures by Rubens.

I was particularly taken with Eugène Delacroix’s watercolor “Seated Arab, c. 1832,” which was acquired by Ms. Pavoncelli in 1997. The drawing, fast and loose, is a portrait of one of the Arab chieftains, whom the artist described in letters to Pierret: “All of them in white, like Roman senators or Greeks at the Panathenean festival.” “Seated Arab” is not the greatest Delacroix I have ever seen, but it fits wonderfully into the von Bülow collection and it has tremendous staying power. It is a drawing that I look forward to seeing at the Morgan — in the company of other future finds by the family von Bülow — again and again.

Until September 30 (225 Madison Ave., between 36th and 37th streets, 212-685-0008).