Saturday, June 9, 2018

Old World Master Drawings across 300 Years

Eustache Le Sueur
Head of a woman
ca. 1646-49
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Jean Joseph Bernard
Marie Antoinette
1787
drawing
British Museum

Jean Joseph Bernard
Louis XVI
1786
drawing
British Museum

"Jean Joseph Bernard began his career as writing-master at the court of the cultivated Stanislas, exiled King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lorraine.  After Stanislas's death in 1766, Bernard moved to Paris, where he developed a form of calligraphic portraiture which rapidly brought him acclaim among the French elite.  In around 1778 he was invited to make portraits of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.  He produced numerous versions of these portraits during the next ten years to satisfy popular demand.  The present sheets are among the later examples of these portraits.  . . .  Although his pen-portraits seem to have been better known than his pure calligraphy, Bernard always seems to have regarded himself as a writing-master.  He was one of the founding members of the Bureau académique d'écriture in 1779, and, after the French Revolution, he found an appointment as writing-master to the pages of the Imperial Court.  His pen-portraits, however, continued to be popular."

– curator's notes from the British Museum

Joseph Mallord William Turner
Study of a ruined building
(probably a demolition-site in London)
ca. 1792
drawing
Tate Gallery

Joseph Mallord William Turner
Ruined building at Albano
(from an album of copies of Italian views)
ca. 1794-98
drawing
Tate Gallery

Joseph Mallord William Turner
Lecture Diagram - Ruined Amphitheatre
ca. 1810
drawing
Tate Gallery

"Made by Turner for his lectures as Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy, this representation of a ruined amphitheatre is associated by Maurice Davies with a larger group of diagrams illustrating the production of shadows.  Peter Bower writes that the sheet is Double Elephant size Whatman paper made by William Balston at Springfield Mill, Maidstone, Kent."  

– curator's notes from the Tate Gallery

Thomas Rowlandson
Christie's Auction-Rooms, Pall Mall
ca. 1808
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Heneage Finch
Ruined Classical Tomb under Trees
before 1812
drawing
Tate Gallery

John Hayter
Mrs Siddons (in old age)
1826
drawing
British Museum

Thomas Rowlandson
Classical Figures
before 1827
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Alessandro Sanquirico
Coronation of the King of Lombardy-Veneto (Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria) in the Cathedral of Milan
1838
drawing
National Gallery of Canada

Frederick Walker
The Moray Minstrels
1865
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

"This design for a printed invitation was created for the well-to-do silk merchant Arthur James Lewis, who often welcomed male friends to Moray Lodge, his bachelor establishment on Campden Hill, overlooking London's Holland Park.  Once a month between January and March, singers would gather on a Saturday evening at 8:30 pm to perform modern and ancient works; and an oyster supper was served at eleven.  Lewis was an amateur artist who joined the Junior Etching Club and welcomed London artists, such as Whistler, to his home.  The invitation captures the jolly informality of  Lewis's entertaining."

– curator's notes from the Metropolitan Museum

Jacobus van Looy
Detail of Gondolier (after a painting by Titian)
before 1930
drawing
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

John Craxton
Llanthony Abbey
1942
drawing
Tate Gallery

"This drawing is of the medieval Llanthony Abbey which stands in an isolated position on the bottom of a steep valley in the Black Mountains, South Wales.  Craxton visited the abbey in 1942 with the graphic designer E.Q. Nicholson.  Although he was surprised to find someone living there, in a house attached to the south side of the building, Craxton was pleased to see that the abbey itself "was wonderfully untouched by the ruinous and dead hand of the then Office of Works."  Describing the abbey as a "living ruin," he recalled, "crows and jackdaws were nesting in the broken gothic windows, ivy everywhere."  Although there are no birds or other animals in this drawing, the buildings and vegetation are given a sense of life by Craxton's anthropomorphic treatment of the uprooted tree, and the vigorous intensity of his technique.  . . .  The writhing, menacing vegetation that frames the ruined abbey was already a standard feature in picturesque landscapes and writing of the Romantic period around 1800.  . . .  The linear technique and dramatic contrasts of light and shade, foreground and background are reminiscent of Samuel Palmer's pastoral scenes.  This combination of human emotion and nature lies at the heart of the British Neo-Romantic movement.  The sense of an endangered earthly paradise had considerable resonance in wartime Britain.  Craxton can be included among a number of artists, including Keith Vaughan, Graham Sutherland, and John Minton, who were concerned with what David Mellor described as, "the body and sexuality; nostalgia and anxiety; myth-making; organic fantasies; the threat of war and extinction." 

– curator's notes from the Tate Gallery