Friday, November 22, 2019

Nineteenth-Century European Drawings

Adolph Menzel
Weeping Man
ca. 1850-60
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

                     Binsey Poplars

                        felled 1879

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
    Of a fresh and following folded rank
                   Not spared, not one
                   That dandled a sandalled
             Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering
    weed-winding bank.

O if we but knew what we do
              When we delve or hew –
    Hack and rack the growing green!
               Since country is so tender
    To touch, her being so slender,
    That, like this sleek and seeing ball
    But a prick will make no eye at all,
    Where we, even where we mean
                     To mend her we end her,
                When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
    Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
        Strokes of havoc unselve
                 The sweet especial scene,
        Rural scene, a rural scene,
        Sweet especial rural scene.

– Gerard Manley Hopkins

Pietro Fancelli
Antique Head of Meleager
before 1850
drawing
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Edward Burne-Jones
Head of a Woman
ca. 1873-77
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Edward Burne-Jones
Head of a Woman, Draped
ca. 1873-77
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Edward Burne-Jones
Head of a Young Woman
ca. 1873-77
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Edward Burne-Jones
Heads of Medusa
(studies for The Rondanini Medusa)
ca. 1873-77
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Henri Fantin-Latour
Self-Portrait
1857
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Gustave Courbet
Model Reading in the Studio
ca. 1849
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Paul Cézanne after Pierre Puget
Hercules Resting (sculpture)
1897
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Edward Burne-Jones
Figure Study (half-length)
1885
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Edward Burne-Jones
Draped Male Figure
ca. 1873-77
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Edward Burne-Jones
Figure Study
ca. 1873-77
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Edward Lear
Cedars of Lebanon
1858
drawing, with watercolor
Art Institute of Chicago

Mauro Berti
Design for Stage Set
before 1842
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York