Art in Japan>European Art 1500-1930>French Drawings from the British Museum: From Fontainebleau to Versailles

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French Drawings from the British Museum: From Fontainebleau to Versailles

Serious music fans prize studio outtakes for taking them a little closer to the creative source. Trials and miscues reveal the process en route to glossy product. In the same way, looking at drawings is like watching an artist think. Artists use drawing, their most basic technique, to practice, work out problems and record ideas. 

Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues,
Cucumber, ca. 1533-1588, watercolor
and body color (Photos ©Trustees of
the British Museum, London)

One of the few examples in pre-modern art where process is more important than finish (unlike painting), drawing is the direct, unassisted connection between an artist's hand and paper. Following the success of their 1996 exhibition of 16th- and 17th-century Italian drawings from the British Museum, the National Museum of Western Art returns to the renowned museum's collection for these 101 works. The title "French Drawings" is a bit misleading—these Old Master works originated in the French royal court between its 16th-century home at Fontainebleau and its 18th-century home at Versailles, but were produced by not only French artists but also Italian, Dutch and other nationalities who were invited to the court. 

The show is divided into three parts: the 16th century and the influence of imported Italian Mannerist painters like Rosso Fiorentino (roughly speaking, classical or biblical stories and portraits), the glorification of France and the king in the 17th century (landscapes and their aristocratic owners), and the light, sensual world of the 18th-century Rococo (theatrical designs, nudes, a rhino). 

Claude Lorrain, Landscape with 
Dancing Satyrs and Nymphs (from the
Liber Veritatis), ca. 1600-1682, pen and
brown ink and brown wash

In traditional Western art history, drawing was always the artisan valet to the princes of painting, etching and sculpture. Not surprisingly, a sense of use-value pervades this show. Sketches are overlaid with grids for enlarging or pricked with pins for transfer to canvas.

But as preliminary steps, the drawings allowed the artists to work with greater freedom. This show captures that vitality in its wide range of styles produced by popular, French court-related artists—Claude Lorrain's bold ink-wash landscapes, Watteau's taut draped figure studies, and Poussin's scribbly outlines of horses and figures. 

Don't expect to be blown away by scale or color. Most of the pieces are in shades of brown, gray or red on paper rarely larger than a sheet of . Color appears sporadically, usually with a subtle vigor like that found in Francois Clouet's portrait of Henry II. The king's face is modeled in delicate crosshatched blushes of red chalk and framed by the rough, black outlines of his shoulders and hat. 

Jacques Callot, Studies of Horses 
and Figures, ca. 1592-1635, brush 
drawing in brown wash with pen and
brown ink

In one of the best examples of what makes drawings fun, Jacques Callot performed a Frankenstein-like transplant, slicing the head off one of his mounted equestrian portraits and later inserting a newly sketched head on a different piece of paper. But because the new head was done in graphite, it doesn't match the brown ink body. This odd contrast is lost in the accompanying etching hung next to the drawing (there are several such side-by-side hangings of preliminary sketch and finished etching in addition to a few small reproductions of the paintings some of the drawings led to). 

Old Master drawing is less sexy than Old Master painting—the last exhibition here was the popular "Masterpieces from the Prado." But visitors go to drawing shows for different reasons. This exhibition will attract fans of the artistic process, students working on their technique, and those with a special interest in French court painters from the end of the Renaissance to the Rococo period.  

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The French Drawings from the British Museum: From Fontainebleau to Versailles exhibition was held July-Sep 2002 at the Tokyo National Museum of Western Art in Ueno Park, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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