DRAWING: EXERCISE AND EXECUTION

by Vivian F. Zoë

Drawing is the basis for all visual art. It is the deployment of line and shape to communicate a visual idea. As art students soon learn, the definition of drawing can include color, chiaroscuro (light and shadow) and motion.

A drawing can serve as a “study” for a later, more finished or refined work in any one of hundreds of media. A drawing is the foundation for an oil painting on canvas, a lithograph, a watercolor and even a three-dimensional work of sculpture.

For generations, drawing has been viewed as the basis for instruction in the fine arts. Many colleges of art require drawing every semester whether or not a student focuses on painting or sculpture. Locally, the Lyme Academy College of Fine Art requires students take a drawing class every semester. The Georgetown University course catalogue defines drawing as the practice of applying marks, as line, texture and tone, to a surface or support, usually paper, using various media such as graphite, charcoal, ink, and chalk. Although sometimes incorporating text, Drawing is a visual language that communicates ideas and information through images.

Drawings form a significant portion of the Slater Museum’s collection. The museum’s position as the “mother” of the Norwich Art School is a direct result of its iconic

Drawing Studio on the Slater Museum Mezzanine, ca. 1898

The Muse

Spring, 2014

The quarterly newsletter of the

Slater Memorial Museum

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The Muse is published up to four times yearly for the members of The Friends of the Slater Memorial Museum. The museum is located at 108 Crescent Street, Norwich, CT 06360. It is part of The Norwich Free Academy, 305 Broadway, Norwich, CT 06360. Museum main telephone number: (860) 887-2506. Visit us on the web at www.slatermuseum.org.Museum Director – Vivian F. ZoëNewsletter editor – Geoff SerraContributing authors: Vivian Zoë, Leigh Thomas

Photographers: Leigh Thomas, Vivian Zoë, Barry Wilson

The president of the Friends of the Slater Memorial Museum: Patricia Flahive

The Norwich Free Academy Board of Trustees:Diana L. Boisclair Jeremy D. Booty Allyn L. Brown, IIIGlenn T. CarberryKeith G. FontaineLee-Ann Gomes, TreasurerThomas M. Griffin, SecretaryThomas HammondDeVol JoynerTheodore N. Phillips, ChairTodd C. PostlerSarette Williams, Vice Chair

The Norwich Free Academy does not discriminate in its educational programs, services or employment on the basis of race, religion, gender, national origin, color, handicapping condition, age, marital status or sexual orientation. This is in accordance with Title VI, Title VII, Title IX and other civil rights or discrimination issues; Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 as amended and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1991.

A Message from the DirectorAfter a struggle of a winter, the light seems finally to be growing and nearing. What a relief to hear the light-driven new songs of birds as they, too, welcome spring. The museum suffered like many institutions with storm closings and delayed work due to inclement weather. But we’ve emerged and have several offerings and exhibitions for your enjoyment. Please take special note of our public, adult drawing event coming up soon. I’m sure many of you have envied the students their ready access to the casts. Here’s your chance along with adult

refreshments! Prepare yourselves to be delighted this summer when we present a special regional invitational exhibition of artwork featuring images of animals of all sorts and sizes, rendered in all media. Please also mark your calendars for the two student exhibitions this spring, always blockbusters and eye-openers!

UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS, PROGRAMS AND EVENTS

Friday, March 215:00 - 7:00 pm

Sunday, April 61:00 - 3:00 pm

Saturday, April 266:00 pm

Friday, May 97:00 - 9:00 pm

HAPPY HOUR DRINK & DRAW Join us for an evening of fine art and fine wine! Event and registration details on page xx

OPENING RECEPTION: The 120th Norwich Art School’s Children’s Exhibition. On View through April 30.

ART AUCTION & DESSERT TASTING: Held in the NFA Atrium. Proceeds benefit the NPS Education Foundation. Items for auc-tion include pieces by Bill Diodato, nationally acclaimed photographer and 2012 Norwich Rotary ‘Native Son’ Award recipient, as well as wonderful pieces by artists with Norwich ties including Merrill Park Keeley; Gabe Lipman; Marge Izbicki; Zach Turner; Susan Matera; and more. In addition, student artists from NFA; Norwich Tech and Norwich Public Schools will exhibit their fine works.

OPENING RECEPTION: The 124th Nor-wich Art School Student Exhibition. On view through June 6.

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CONSERVATION OF EMMONS’ RUSSELL HUBBARD PROGRESSES

Recently, a painting of great significance to the people of Norwich and its environs was placed on long term loan to the Slater Memorial Museum. Forge Brook Pond, Poquetanuck Cove, Preston, an oil on canvas by John Denison Crocker (1822-1907) was unveiled at a private gathering at the museum on November 13.

Loaned by the Town of Preston, the painting underwent significant conservation at the Clinton Fine Art Conservation Studio before being placed on display in the museum.

Late last October, the fine and large Alexander Hamilton Emmons (1816-1884) portrait of NFA Founder and first Board Chairman, Russell Hubbard (1795-1857) long languishing in the museum’s attic was de-livered to the Clinton (CT) Fine Arts Workshop for conservation. Its three layers of later-added backings, including various laminated board products and New York Times (1924) glued as a final reverse surface have been removed and 150 years of dirt cleaned from the obverse. During this process, the obverse was protected with “facings,” a layer of specially-formulated paper impregnated with compounds to secure the fragile paint to the original canvas during treatment. Further progress has been made and the Russell Hub-bard is now consolidated, backed with Belgian linen and attached to a temporary stretcher. The next step is to remove the protective facings seen in the images below. Trial cleanings are visible through the facings.

Watch this space for a future announcememt of the painting’s unveiling.

Russell Hubbard by Alexander Hamilton Emmons with facings before treatment (left) and after (right).

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collection of plaster casts used since 1890 as subject matter for the practice of “drawing from the antique.” Classical sculpture served as the foundation to train the eye to understand beauty and the hand to render it.

The history of drawing demonstrates its use to investigate the personal, social, natural, scientific, spiritual and imaginative aspects of life. In addition to the investigative nature of the sketch, drawings can become more polished works of art making sensitive statements about the subject and content.

Daniel Wadsworth Coit’s (1787 – 1876) pencil drawing of a View of Norwich from Jail Hill, looking south, was later engraved by Milo Osborne, published by the Kellogg Brothers, and broadly distributed. The view shows, nestled into the treetops, City Hall and Trinity Episcopal Church. The drawing reveals the influence of the Hudson River School in many aspects including the detailed but romantic rendering of the leaves on the trees, each seeming to have its own personality.

View of Norwich from Jail Hill by Daniel Wadsworth Coit, Collection of the Slater Museum

NEW INSTALLATIONS REFRESH EXHIBITIONS

Recently, a multi-year plan of conserva-tion of frames in the museum’s collec-tion was approved and begun. Included in the 40, mostly 19th century, frames identified as candidates were several on display in long-term exhibitions. The frames for Alexander Hamilton Em-mons’ (1816-1884) Bill Brothers (Henry Gustavus and John Harper Bill) and An-nie Eliza Almy were recently completed along with conservation of the portraits, all children. The former, very large double portrait is now re-installed on the north wall of the Crocker’s Norwich gallery. The Almy portrait has been in-stalled along the mezzanine to replace the Emmons portrait of Annie Palm-er The Palmer frame went out for conservation along with the frame for John Denison Crocker’s (1822-1907) portrait of Emma Enders Crocker, long thought to be Crocker’s mother, but recently identified as his daughter-in-law. The Enders has been replaced by an earlier-conserved Crocker portrait of Su-san Potter Beckwith (pictured below), one in which his remark-able skills of detail observation shines. Like the portrait of her sister-in-law, Celeste Lydia Kenyon Beckwith, hanging nearby, the Susan Potter Beckwith tells us much about the clothing and accessories of women in the latter quarter of the 19th cen-

tury. Many of these paintings have been in storage for many years, even before the completion of the new collections stor-age facility and the migration of objects into it. A new, larg-er and better lighted case has been installed with additional objects of Islamic reference, alo long in storage. Visit soon to see these newly installed pieces and watch for future revolving of objects from storage.

Susan Potter Beckwith

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Born in Norwich, Daniel Wadsworth Coit left for California with the Gold Rush of 1849. He was elected to the National Academy and created some of the earliest known drawings of San Francisco. According to a “memoir” “retold” by Daniel Coit Gilman, Coit’s brother Joshua wrote in a letter to family “You have all witnessed [his] passion for sketching from nature which was one of the most enduring of his favorite pursuits.” Gilman writes that on travels through Europe, Coit’s friends saw him taking off, “sketch book and pencil in hand for an artistic point of view” and seldom failing “to bring away a more or less finished sketch and memento of figure or landscape.…[He] bought his own carriage that he might move about at his convenience, stopping when and where he pleased to make sketches or to walk across country and climb mountains in search of picturesque effects. Rising with the sun to secure a view before continuing his journey, or leaving the dinner table to make a sketch from the window of an inn…he succeeded not infrequently in making at least two or three finished sketches in a day.”

The Norwich Art School was literally a professional training institution for artists from the beginning. In its earliest years, the Norwich Art School held numerous classes in the late afternoons and evenings to serve “adult” students who, as today, worked at “day jobs.” The Slater Memorial Building housed the art school, and the Mezzanine was used as a drawing studio.

Third NFA Head of School, Robert Porter Keep remarked at the opening of the Art School that “The Art School is designed to promote the general advantage of the community. It offers thorough training to residents of Norwich and others and seeks to promote the application of Art to Industry, and with this latter view, the departments of Design and Modelling in clay have been established and a class in Draughting has been organized.”

William A. Slater and other benefactors supported the Art School. The initial faculty included Alice Van Vechten Brown, who taught “Antique” and life drawing, and Isaiah W. Olcott who taught drafting. Norwich Art School Director from 1891 until 1897, Alice Van Vechten Brown studied painting from 1881 to 1885 at the Art Students’ League in New

York under William Merritt Chase and Abbott Thayer. Miss Brown used the cast collection not only to teach drawing but also seeing: the ability to train the eye to observe shape, form, light and shadow. She brought this innovation with her to Wellesley, where she created a technique of study still known as the “Wellesley Method,” wherein art history students learn in a “laboratory” to work with the materials and techniques of the masters.

Ozias Dodge (1868-1925), artist, inventor and adventurer, was Art School Director from 1897 to 1913. During convalescence from a serious childhood injury, Dodge taught himself to draw and paint and, judging from his adult work, to see as an artist sees. With the encouragement of his mother, he committed to professional training. After Groton Academy (1885/86), later Lawrence Academy, in 1886 he entered the prestigious Yale School of Art.

At Yale, he received an award for “Masterly Drawing” and a scholarship to continue his studies at the Art Students League in New York. The Art Students League, a cooperative founded in 1875, provided classes and exhibition opportunities to emerging artists. Though the League was formed to provide an alternative to the rigid and academic training available in New York and around the country, the use of plaster casts for “drawing from the antique” was still very much an element of its training. Ironically, the venerated artist and League instructor,

Drawing Class at the Slater Museum, ca. 1890

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William Merritt Chase, had resigned because of his unwillingness to accept the continued use of plaster casts as a substitute for the live nude model. At that time, Dodge could not have anticipated that he would one day be at the Norwich Art School, immersed in an environment where the “antique” at the Slater was the singular and ubiquitous motif for “life drawing.”

Dodge next moved the France to study under Jean-Léon Gérôme in Paris, at the École des Beaux Arts, another bastion of “drawing from the antique.” The history of the École des Beaux Arts is a longer but similar to its much younger American cousin. In 1648 a group of young artists broke from the conservative artisan establishment and formed a union in Paris. The first French fine-arts institution, modeled after long-standing Italian institutions, it was considered revolutionary for its time.

Originally named the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, the school’s main goals were to provide free instruction and promote equality among students. In this democratic spirit, free instruction made it possible for students from all social backgrounds to attend. Qualifying contests allowed students to advance on merit. The curriculum of the Académie was based on the fundamental characteristics of modern aesthetic thinking -- simplicity, grandeur, cleanness and harmony. To best embody this modern aesthetic, students studied works of art from Greek and Roman Antiquity.

From the course catalog of the era, we know that while director of the Norwich Art School, Ozias Dodge taught

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Above: Male Nude by Ozias Dodge. Collection of the Slater Memorial MuseumBelow: The École des Beaux Arts, Paris

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HAPPY HOUR DRINK & DRAWPLEASE JOIN US FOR AN EVENING OF FINE ART AND FINE WINE!

FRIDAY, MARCH 21, 2014 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM

Spend the evening sketching in our galleries and sampling an array of spirits and light bites to refresh your palate and loosen your creativity! We provide the paper, pencils and sketchboards, or bring your own. Refreshments are included in your admission fee. No artistic experience necessary, but ID is required!

Tickets for this event may be purchased in advance by calling 860-425-5563, in person at the Slater Museum Visitor center or by completing the form below and submitting it with your payment.

Advanced purchase price: $20 / $15 members(Advanced purchase ticket orders must be received no later than Tuesday, March 18, 2014)

Regular purchase price: $25 / $20 members

To make a reservation this event, please clip and remit with payment. Forms and payment should be mailed to: Slater Memorial Museum ● 108 Crescent Street ● Norwich, CT 06360

# of reservations:________ x Advanced rate: $ ______ Regular rate: $ ______

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Check enclosed (payable to Slater Memorial Museum) Visa Mastercard

Please provide the following information. Tickets will not be mailed. You will be notified by email (if pro-vided) or by telephone to confirm your order.

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“Preparatory, Antique, Life and Illustration.” Among the drawings in the collection of the Slater Museum, none exemplify as brilliantly the draftsman’s skill as Dodge’s. Many are of live nude models, most likely completed at Yale, the Art Students League or the École. In these, one sees Dodge’s keen understanding of anatomy, form, line and weight.

Charlotte Fuller Eastman (1878-1965) was the fourth Director of the Norwich Art School. Returning to her native city and alma mater, Eastman was a substitute teacher from 1909 to 1911. She had attended the Broad Street and Broadway Schools and graduated from NFA in 1897. She was a scholarship student at the Norwich Art School (a subsidiary of NFA at that time.) She continued as a scholarship student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, receiving the Thayer Prize in Design.

Eastman became a staff designer for the publisher Frederick J. Quimby Company where she illuminated special editions on parchment and won the firm a gold medal at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition. She attended the Art Institute of Chicago and designed and illustrated for the University press, A. C. McClurg and others.

She returned to Norwich in 1909, substituted in the Norwich Art School, and in 1911, became Director, a position she held until retirement in 1943. During a year’s leave, she lived and studied in Paris with Filippo Colarossi and André L’Hote, exhibiting in the (Paris) Salon and Salon D’Automne.

The Académie Colarossi, an art school founded by the Italian sculptor Filippo Colarossi, was established in the 19th century as an alternative to the government-sanctioned École des Beaux Arts which, in the eyes of many promising young artists, had become too conservative. Along with its equivalent, Académie Julian, but unlike the official École, the Académie Colarossi accepted female students and allowed them to draw from the nude male model. Noted also for its classes in life

sculpting, the school attracted many foreign students, including a large number from the United States. In 1910, the progressive Académie appointed Frances Hodgkins (1869–1947) its first female teacher. In 1922 British sculptor Henry Moore took life-drawing classes which were open to the general public at Colarossi. The evening classes were progressively timed – one hour, then 20 minutes, then five minutes, then one – to develop various drawing skills. Today, we call these quick studies gesture drawings.

André L’Hote (1885-1962) was a French painter, sculptor, writer, and educator who was a prominent critic and teacher of modern art. He studied decorative sculpture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux from 1898 to 1904. About 1905 he took up painting, and a year later moved to Paris. L’Hote initially painted colorful landscapes in a Fauvist style, but his mature works are Cubist. L’Hote’s most significant work was not as a visual artist, however, but rather as a writer who articulated Cubist theories and as an educator who influenced a generation of French artists. In 1922 he founded his own art school in Paris, the Académie Montparnasse. Eastman’s somewhat Fauvist portraiture uses planar drawing techniques, reflecting L’Hote’s influence.

An art class at the Académie Colarossi, where CharlotteFuller Eastman was a student, note live, child model.

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The Salon was the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux Arts in Paris. From 1748 to 1890 it was the greatest annual or biannual art event in the Western world. Since 1903, The Salon d’Automne (Autumn Salon) has been an annual art exhibition held in Paris. Perceived as a reaction against the conservative policies of the official Salon, this massive exhibition almost immediately became the showpiece of developments and innovations in 20th-century art in all media. The Salon D’Automne was immediately supported by artists, including Renoir, Gauguin, Cézanne and Duchamp, whose names have become synonymous with impressionism, Fauvism and Cubism.

In Southeastern Connecticut, Eastman was a member of the Mystic Art Association and the Connecticut Watercolor Society.

She lived on Coit Lane, near the Norwichtown Green and Mediterranean Lane, an artists’ and educators’ enclave of sorts in the city, attracting future Art School Directors Ozias Dodge and Blanche Browning and Slater Museum Director Hannah Dodge. Eastman edited her sister’s poems and other writing after Margaret Fuller’s death in 1954. While at the Norwich Art School, Eastman used her students as subjects for dozens of portraits now in the collection of the Slater Museum. In 1957, the Norwich Art School established a scholarship fund in Eastman’s honor.

She designed the memorial to men lost in World War I on the campus of NFA.

Eastman’s early life was filled with tragedy, as she was widowed shortly after her wedding when her young husband, Guy Warner Eastman, was killed stepping off a curb by a horse-drawn carriage. She never re-married and spent most summers in Paris, immersed in its culture. She filled hundreds of small sketch books with drawings made while sitting in sidewalk cafés, streetcars, on park benches or walking in the many street markets.

The museum’s collection includes dozens of sketchbooks from these sojourns. They are remarkable records of the draftsman’s (or draftswoman’s) exercises and offer much instruction to students of drawing today.

Among the many artists represented in the Slater Museum’s collection, these are only two whose work raises the level of the exercise of drawing to finished works of art. The Slater Museum and the Norwich Art School celebrate daily the history and tradition of “drawing from the antique” as the unique cast collection enters its third century on campus.

Coit, Dodge and Eastman stood on tall and ancient shoulders. Communication through drawing pre-dates written language. Caves in Southwestern France and Northwestern Spain were discovered in the first half of the 20th century with magnificent drawings of animals, most likely hunted for food or observed in the

Luxembourg Jardin by Charlotte Fuller Eastman, collection of the Slater Museum.

Cave painting of a dun horse at Lascaux, France.

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wild. Other images depict humans and demonstrate to our era the life of people of the Upper Paleolithic, the latter part of the last Ice Age. While these works were created over 17,000 years ago, they are miracles of skill and beauty.

The Dabous Giraffe Rock Art Petroglyph in a barren desert landscape in Niger, Central Africa, is one of the finest examples of ancient rock art in the world. Two life-size giraffes carved in stone, one large male side by side before a smaller female on the sandstone’s weathered surface, were engraved between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago. The larger of the two, over 18 feet tall, combines several techniques including scraping, smoothing and deeply engraved outlines. In Bhimbetka, India, rock paintings similar to those in France are said to date from 30,000 years ago.

In Central China, the Daimaidi rock carvings include a hunting scene, dating from 7000-32.000 BCE. Traditional Chinese painting dates to the Neolithic Age of about 6,000 years ago when people began to use minerals to draw simple images of animals, plants, and human beings on rocks. Drawings of elaborate designs and decorations on the surface of pottery included human faces, fish, deer and frogs. Cave and religious grotto paintings date from the 4th to 6th centuries CE and refined drawings, mostly on silk scrolls emerge in China around 1000 CE.

Rendered in a simple style, they nevertheless accurately depict human form and movement. The earliest Chinese drawings on paper and silk are

funerary articles over 2,000 years old. Beginning in the mid-6th century, as Buddhism was brought to Japan from what is now Korea,

religious art was introduced from the mainland. The earliest religious paintings in Japan were copied using mainland styles and techniques, and are similar to the art of the Chinese Sui dynasty (581–618) or the early 5th century

CE. In 18th and 19th century Japan, the prints of the Ukiyo-e, marvels of draftsmanship and color, are

filled with images of secular and common, royal and court life.

Visitors to the Slater Museum are aware that beginning about 3000 BC, Egyptians created colorful drawings on the walls of their temples and tombs. The museum’s main stairway exhibits

several facsimiles, portraying scenes of daily life in a flat, linear style that often idealized the

human form. A level of naturalism exists in these lively images, but their perspective and anatomy are

naïvely rendered. Egyptian writing on papyrus was often illustrated with similar designs in pen and ink. The

ornamentation of ancient Greek pottery reveals the same remarkable skill as their sculpture represented in the Slater’s

plaster cast collection. Figures engaged in various activities including battle and sport often ornamented Greek pottery.

The drawing style accurately captures anatomy and, especially, movement.

Drawing reflects the aesthetic of its era. As an element of a work of art, a finished art form, or a preliminary to one, a drawing reveals much about the creator’s sensibility. Medieval drawings reflect disregard for science and observation of the natural world. Figures often appear weightless and without mass. Drawings, as all art in this era, instructed about early Christianity and morality. Monks

Panathenaic amphora (Vase) filled with sacred olive oil, awarded as a prize to a winner of the Panathenaic games held in Athens every four years.

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were likely to have the skills to draw and paint, to create copies from earlier work, and embellish written text.

Until paper was made in the 1100’s CE, artists drew on treated animal skins called parchment or vellum or on wooden panels, slate or wax. Because paper was a luxury long after its invention in Europe, this practice continued into the Renaissance. Copying others’ drawings as an exercise remained a common practice into the 20th century.

In the Late Medieval and Early Renaissance drawing began to assume a more studied approach. The work of Giotto (1266-1337), an early Florentine architect considered a master of the fresco, reflects this new emphasis. His fresco Legend of St Francis: Renunciation of Worldly Goods reveals his of observation of nature, with drawn figure displaying musculature, volume and a sense of weight. Giotto is largely considered to have paved the way for the naturalistic work of later artists of the Renaissance.

In the 1400’s in Italy, during the Renaissance, all things scientific and studied were celebrated as never before. Drawings demonstrate anatomical, spatial and tonal accuracy, and drawing became a means to illustrate scientific discoveries and lessons in botany and biology. The human form was idealized as it had

been by the ancient Greeks. At the same time, drawing during the Renaissance revealed all of humankind’s physical deformities in an objective, scientific and realistic manner. Drawing directly from live nude models entered the academies, ateliers and schools. The study of medicine often included recording treatments and learning anatomy from cadavers.

Drawing emerged as its own art form in the Renaissance. The drawings of Michelangelo and Leonardo are some of the most glorious works of art ever created. Even Leonardo’s mechanical drawings of real and hypothetical machines were brilliant pyrotechnics of skill and beauty. Also during the Renaissance artists began to use chalks and crayons that could be manipulated to depict

Legend of St Francis: Renunciation of Worldly Goods, Upper Church of San Francesco at Assisi (1297-1300)

The Return of the Prodigal Son (1642) by Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606–1669), drawing with pen and brush, Teylers Museum, Haarlem

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the chiaroscuro (light and shadow) on an object and to give drawings a sense of volume difficult to portray with pen and ink and pencil. Conté crayons and charcoal were added to the artist’s necessary tools.

With understanding of anatomy and scientific perspective increasing in the Renaissance, religious, decorative and ornamental artwork acquired the same accuracy of draftsmanship as portraiture and academic work. Frescoes were painted on the walls and ceilings of churches, cathedrals, academic buildings and majestic homes. To produce these painted surfaces with the same accuracy

of smaller works on canvas, the artist first created a “cartoon,” or large, accurate scale drawing, usually in charcoal. The cartoon was most often drawn on a lightweight material that with charcoal coating the reverse for tracing onto the final surface. The employment of assistants to support the work of the master to transfer the cartoon and aid with the application of color, created a cadre of young protégés.

The concepts and practices of the Italian artists of the Renaissance began to migrate north into Northern Europe in the 1500’s. The artists of Germany and the Netherlands gradually adopted a style even more scientific and detached. The concept of the Grand Tour took hold wherein English and Northern European artists wishing to study classical art travelled to Italy where they were exposed to the realistic and academic methods of earlier Southern European artists. Artists like Albrecht Dürer of Germany and Hans Holbein of Switzerland made finished drawings and prints as works of art for sale. Dürer was a master printmaker who also used ink, inkwash and watercolor to complete his works on paper. Holbein was a master of drawing portraits with black chalk.

In the Baroque and Rococo periods, drawings became more expressive and animated. Line became active and movement a key element of drawing. Peter Paul Rubens of Flanders is considered a master of drawing and painting of the 1600’s. Rembrandt van Rijn led the flowering of artmaking in the Netherlands in the 17th century. His drawings were both skillfully drafted and expressively painted. Jean-Antoine Watteau, Jean-Honoré

Fragonard and François Boucher dominated the French Rococo with decorative lines and cheerful subjects. Their work is often characterized by active, complex marks exemplified in renderings of the billowing dresses of young women surrounded by leafy trees.

Drawing in the nineteenth century has a similar trajectory to many other art forms of the era. The pencil we know today was first manufactured early in the century, and the French artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres created refined portrait drawings in graphite. The first two decades

Drawing of the human fetus in utero from Leonardo’s anatomical notebooks. The fetus is in the breech position.

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of the century were marked by a harkening back to the Classical eras of ancient Greece and Rome. Women’s fashion and furniture design followed this trend, as did the execution of drawing, once again, becoming controlled and draftsmanlike.

In Spain and France, the era saw the more expressive ink and wash drawings of Francisco Goya and the “realist” drawings of Edgar Degas. Degas experimented with what today would be called photographic viewpoints including off-center picture planes and vantage points from above or below. Degas used many drawing media to portray active street scenes, bathers, dancers and horse races. Degas’ non-traditional imagery and perspective led the way for the Fauvists and Impressionists of the latter part of the 19th century. These artists eschewed the formal traditions of execution and training. Their drawings were incorporated more directly into their paintings, and their abstracted imagery sometimes make it difficult to apply the classical definition of drawing to their work.

While the 20th century brought an even more flagrant flouting of past conventions of art in Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, Dadaism and Postmodernism, most art schools continued to base their foundations in drawing and specifically, figure drawing. The Art Students’ League was established by artists who had been marginalized by the traditional academy approach to artistic study, but it ensured that a life drawing class was always available to artists.

Using the Slater Memorial Museum’s cast collection, the many teaching artists of the Norwich Art School still today include the rigorous study of drawing in their curriculum. As a tool for regional artists, the collection is unsurpassed in the development of drawing skills.

Acknowledgement: Helen B. Mules, Associate Curator of Drawings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has researched and written extensively on the history of drawing. Her concise work provided great insights into the evolution of drawing for this article.

Detail from The Forestier Family (1806) by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, pencil on paper. Collection of the Louvre, Paris

CHANGE SERVICE REQUESTED

At right: Students from one of the earliest Norwich Art School’s children’s classes.

THE 120th SATURDAY MORNING ART CLASS EXHIBTION

April 6 - April 30, 2014Opening Reception: April 6, 1 - 3 p.m.

THE 124th NORWICH ART SCHOOLSTUDENT EXHIBITION

May 9 - June 6, 2014Opening Reception: May 9, 7 - 9 p.m.

Two successive exhibitions will feature art work byNFA and elementary students who participated in the vari-

ous art courses offered during the academicyear. Paintings, drawings, prints and mixed

media pieces, photography and graphic designs,sculpture, clay objects, metal and jewelry creations,

and wood working projects will be displayed.