Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Bonington Millais Musurus Rothenstein Vernet Vuillard Wilkie

Richard Parkes Bonington
Cast of the so-called Faun of Praxiteles
after an original in the Capitoline Museums, Rome
(Academic study made in Paris)

ca. 1819-22
drawing
British Museum

Richard Parkes Bonington
Académie made in Paris
1820
drawing
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Richard Parkes Bonington
Cast of an antique statue of the Dancing Faun
(Academic study made in Paris)

ca. 1819-22
drawing
Yale Center for British Art

John Everett Millais
Retribution, or, The man with two wives
1854
drawing
British Museum

John Everett Millais
Study for the painting, Jephthah's Daughter
ca. 1867
drawing
British Museum

Paul Musurus
Man sitting in an armchair
ca. 1855-65
drawing
British Museum

Paul Musurus
Domestic interior by lamplight
ca. 1855-65
drawing
British Museum

"And the degree to which poetry accords with nature may, I think, be seen from the fact that common, uneducated persons without any knowledge of letters or learning, if they have wit, enjoy the employment of their crude powers in making certain sounds and rhythms.  Even when their sense would be better and more easily expressed in prose, they think they have made something worth hearing only when they have stuck it into verse.  Again, when Mass is being said in church, we sometimes yawn and fall asleep even when it is being done very beautifully, but when once the poetical refrain breaks out, the Primo dierum omnium, or the Iste Confessor, or the Ut queant laxis resonare fibris, which of us is so earthbound as not to feel some lifting up of the soul, some inspired feeling?  It is for this reason that certain of the ancients believed the soul to be a number and a harmony.  It was certain (they thought) that all things in accordance with nature enjoyed that which was most similar and related to themselves, and there was nothing which so softened and delighted our souls as harmony and number.  But this is another and greater subject.  For the moment, this only do I wish to be understood: that it is to poetry, more than to any other branch of letters, that nature attracts us; that it possesses a great deal of utility, pleasure, and nobility; and that that man who has no knowledge of it can by no means be said to be liberally educated."

– from The Study of Literature, an essay written in Latin by Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444), translated by Craig W. Kallendorf and published in Humanist Educational Treatises (Cambridge, Massachusetts : I Tatti Renaissance Library, Harvard University Press, 2002)

William Rothenstein
Portrait of the actor Constant Coquelin, called Coquelin aîné
1898
lithograph
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

William Rothenstein
Portrait of Henry James
1898
lithograph
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Horace Vernet
Gabrielle Gauffrée modeling embroidered court-dress
1805
hand-colored engraving
(from Journal des Dames et des Modes, Paris)
Rijksmuseum,  Amsterdam

Édouard Vuillard
Académie
ca. 1890
drawing
Minneapolis Institute of Art

David Wilkie
Model ascending a ladder
1840
wash drawing
British Museum

David Wilkie
Two studies of recumbent model
before 1841
drawing
National Galleries of Scotland

David Wilkie
Study of three costumed figures on a ladder
ca. 1835-38
drawing, with watercolor and colored chalk
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge