Wednesday, May 9, 2018

European Figure Drawings - Eighteenth Century

Jacopo Amiconi
Woman dressed for masked ball
before 1752
drawing on blue paper
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

attributed to Jacopo Amiconi
Portrait of a daughter of King George II
before 1752
drawing on blue paper
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Jacopo Amiconi
David and Abigail
before 1752
drawing
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

François Boucher
Diana and two nymphs
before 1770
drawing
National Galleries of Scotland

Religio Medici

God's own best will bide the test
     And God's own worst will fall;
But, best or worst or last or first,
     He ordereth it all.

For all is good, if understood,
     (Ah, could we understand!)
And right and ill are tools of skill
     Held in His either hand.

The harlot and the anchorite,
     The martyr and the rake,
Deftly He fashions each aright,
      Its vital part to take.

Wisdom He makes to form the fruit
     Where the high blossoms be;
And Lust to kill the weaker shoot,
     And Drink to trim the tree.

And Holiness that so the bole
     Be solid at the core;
And Plague and Fever, that the whole
     Be changing evermore.

He chokes the infant throat with slime,
     He sets the ferment free;
He builds the tiny tube of lime
     That blocks the artery.

He lets the youthful dreamer store
     Great projects in his brain,
Until He drops the fungus spore
     That smears them out again.

He stores the milk that feeds the babe,
     He dulls the tortured nerve;
He gives a hundred joys to sense
     Where few or none might serve.

And still He trains the branch of good
     Where the high blossoms be,
And wieldeth still the sheers of ill
     To prune and prune His tree.

– Arthur Conan Doyle, from Songs of the Road (London: Smith, Elder, 1911)

Giovanni Domenico Campiglia
Medici Venus
ca. 1730
drawing
National Galleries of Scotland

John Flaxman
Massacre of the Britons at Stonehenge 
1783
drawing (design for sculpted frieze)
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

John Flaxman
Massacre of the Britons at Stonehenge 
1783
drawing (design for sculpted frieze)
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

John Hamilton Mortimer
Apollo embracing a bust of author John Gay
(design for frontispiece to Bell's British Theatre)
ca. 1777
drawing
Morgan Library, New York

Hubert Robert
Traveler gazing at a monumental vase in the garden of the Maronite Convent in Rome
1764
drawing
National Gallery of Canada

George Romney
Flaxman modelling the bust of Hayley
1795
drawing
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Gabriel de Saint-Aubin
Interior of the artist's studio
1780
drawing
British Museum

"E. Dacier quotes M.A. Staring's view of this drawing [directly above], which sees it as symbolic of the artist's approaching death, with the lamp reversed, the inscription below the crucified Christ, the Magdalen (symbol of repentance), and the artist's mannequin in the attitude of death.  Saint Aubin died in February 1780 in extreme poverty and dissolution.  His studio (of which a corner is shown here) was spectacularly filthy and disorganised."

– curator's notes from the British Museum

Sir Stuart Threipland
Académie
ca. 1740
drawing
National Galleries of Scotland

Sir Stuart Threipland
Académie
ca. 1740
drawing
National Galleries of Scotland

Carle Vanloo
Agony in the Garden
1760
drawing
Getty Museum, Los Angeles