In 2001, “Master Drawings London” brought together several top-flight galleries to hold simultaneous exhibitions of watercolors, charcoals, oil sketches, and pencil and ink drawings as a way of showcasing such works for collectors. In 2007, the event made its New York debut. Starting tomorrow, 16 Upper East Side galleries — some lending their space to London dealers — will participate in an artistic extravaganza not to be missed.

A general view holds that nowadays American collectors of fine art care only about paintings. When collectors visit museums, they see the huge crowds flocking to look at paintings, generally not bothering to savor drawings or works in other media. This has to do with several factors. Museums may privilege paintings because the large crowds museums try ever harder to lure can’t comfortably view smaller-scale works. Also, the fragility of works on paper, as opposed to canvas or board, makes their perpetual exhibition impossible. The Brooklyn Museum, for example, shows any one of the works in its peerless collection of American watercolors only once every several years. What donor to a museum wishes his or her name to go up on the wall label once every seven years? The situation is a pity, and one that “Master Drawings New York” attempts to rectify.

The works on display appeal to two groups of collectors primarily. The first is the serious connoisseur interested in the unique aesthetic qualities of drawings and watercolors, and in their scholarly value. The other is the relatively impecunious collector or starter collector who could not begin to afford paintings but who might build up a nice collection of small works that may yield no less aesthetic satisfaction than larger-scale works.

The dealers involved in the show — including Jean-Luc Baroni (late of Colnaghi) at Adam Williams; L’Antiquaire & The Connoisseur; Pandora Old Masters, exhibiting at Mark Murray; David Tunick, and Nissman, Abromson of Brookline, Mass., at Praxis International Art — are all major dealers and every one of them has outstanding works on exhibit, and for sale. I had the opportunity to preview several dealers’ offerings and was deeply impressed by the quality of many of the works and the rarity of some.

Gerald Stiebel, for example, has a signed and authenticated chalk-on-paper drawing of a small boy’s head by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, the 18th-century French master. As with many of the works on display, this is a drawing complete unto itself, apparently not a study for a painting or other work. It’s about as arresting a boy’s head as you’ll ever see, infused with 18th-century French effervescence yet also, as only the 18th-century French seemed able to do, a work that for all the wild motion of its line simultaneously conveys serenity.

The boy looks to his left, so we see, just off center in the right half of the frame, his splendidly bulging eye, as though he were alert to us viewing him. Stiebel also has an amazing drawing by the French 18th-century Neoclassical sculptor Augustin Pajou, of Pyrrhus and Glaucias, dated 1754, making this an early example of Neoclassicism, with a simple, almost schematic line as different as can be from the Greuze. Different too is that this is not a head against a blank background but a scene with many superbly individuated figures crowded into a fully rendered architectural setting — with the artist’s name visible on a distant temple frieze. This drawing was once owned by Pajou’s great teacher, Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne II. Pajou himself was among the most important French sculptors of the century.

Of special interest at Stiebel is a fine drawing by Gabriel-Jacques de Saint-Aubin, a splendid complement to the wonderful show of this artist’s works at the Frick Collection through January 27. This is one of Saint-Aubin’s atmospheric urban scenes, a gentleman pausing with his right stockinged leg upon the first step of a stairway as he glances furtively behind, perhaps on his way to an illicit assignation.

The London dealer Emanuel von Baeyer, showing at Stiebel, has a remarkable watercolor by the father-and-son team of Louis-Nicolas van Blarenberghe (known for his snuff boxes) and Henri-Joseph van Blarenberghe, “A Village Scene with Nobles and Their Tenantry” from 1776. In the lower part of the picture there is an almost frieze-like crush of bodies — the kind of which Maurice Prendergast would later become the undisputed master, and which is very difficult to produce in this medium — with a beautifully rendered, finely detailed topographical perspective that occupies the greater part of the picture — an expertly handled juxtaposition of scales.

The few London dealers are showing at Dickinson. Andrew Wyld and W/S Fine Art has very good works by John Sell Cotman, Benjamin Haydon, J.M.W. Turner, and John Constable. The Fine Art Society has a trio of heart-melting watercolor plant studies by the Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Dickinson itself has on offer a number of works by Sir Francis Grant, whose drawings differ markedly from the fashionable portraits that made him famous. Father and daughter watercolor portraits from 1840 by Sir David Wilkie show Admiral Walker of the Turkish Fleet in a very fine dignified pose. But the admiral’s little daughter, in her Ottoman dress, is a true highlight.

David Tunick, as can be expected, has a richly diverse selection on display, including many works from the private collection of Neil and Sharon Phillips, among them newly attributed drawings by Piranesi and Géricault. A hooded figure by Fra Bartolommeo is one of the few Italian Renaissance drawings on display.

A head-and-shoulders chalk drawing by Guercino, from the 17th century, and a mostly chalk landscape study by Thomas Gainsborough, from the 18th, are both wonderful surprises, as is a very mature Cubist drawing by Juan Gris that has till now been out of circulation for several decades. A St. Augustine by William Blake, dockworkers by Reginald Marsh, and “Woman on an Aeroplane” by Norman Rockwell show the range at Tunick.

I was particularly captivated by the Englishman Samuel Prout’s “French Street with the Café du Mont Blanc,” a watercolor from the 1830s or 1840s that splendidly captures the vertiginous byways of the July Monarchy, with all of Prout’s characteristic strong line.

What “Master Drawings New York” shows us is, first of all, the glory of drawing and watercolor as media every bit as interesting as any others, and, second, how many treats and surprises remain at large in fields of art where we think we’ve seen it all, but haven’t come close.

For more information, go to masterdrawingsinnewyork.com.