Saturday, December 3, 2016

19th-century Views and Figures in Drawings and Prints

Jean Victor Bertin
Arched bridge
early 19th century
drawing
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

attributed to Antonio de Pian
Loggia by a river
19th century
drawing
Morgan Library, New York

attributed to Antonio de Pian
Round temple
19th century
drawing
Morgan Library, New York

John Constable
Landscape study
1829
drawing
British Museum

"Constable was deeply ambivalent about the relationship between art and emotion. On the one hand he believed that authentic art grew out of the artist's emotional life, but on the other he held that painting maintained an intimate connection to knowledge and as such was indifferent to feeling, whether of the artist or the viewer. There is a story that illustrates this ambivalence very well. One day when the visionary artist William Blake was looking through one of Constable's sketchbooks, he stopped at a picture of some fir trees and exclaimed that it was 'not drawing but inspiration.' This was the highest compliment Blake could pay Constable; he meant that Constable had transcended the visible condition of the trees and had been able to express their invisible reality, their spiritual 'truth.' But it was a compliment that Constable could not accept; feigning ignorance of these concerns, he replied rather priggishly, 'I never knew it before; I meant it for drawing.'" 

 from Constable by Jonathan Clarkson (London : Phaidon Press, 2010)

Isidore Pils
Figure study for a soldier
19th century
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Isidore Pils
Figure study for Clovis
19th century
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Eugène Delacroix
Man and Woman 
1835
drawing
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Odalisque
ca. 1824-34
grisaille
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Édouard Manet
Proof prints of vignettes for an edition of Mallarmé
1875
woodcuts
British Museum

Édouard Manet
Swallows
1874
etching
British Museum

Benjamin Robert Haydon
Study for the figure of Solomon
1812
drawing
British Museum

Benjamin Robert Haydon
Study for the figure of Christ
early 19th century
drawing
British Museum

Benjamin Robert Haydon
Study of a sculpture
early 19th century
drawing
British Museum

Benjamin Robert Haydon
Seated figure
1810
drawing
British Museum

A friend and correspondent of John Keats, the artist Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786-1846) belonged to a generation with a particular talent for unhappiness. According to David Blayney Brown, "Haydon was greatly impressed by the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon frieze, of which he made drawings in 1808. He championed them vociferously. Unfortunately the marbles encouraged Haydon's injudicious preference for working on a vast scale. ... The last major English painter in the historical grand style of Reynolds, he was as much the victim of his overweening ambition and combative personality as of changing tastes, and his sense of his own genius  a Romantic concept wholly in keeping with the period  was regrettably greater than his genius itself."