All Objects

Reni, a prolific draftsman, distributed his drawings rather freely among his pupils and creditors. Nonetheless, nine hundred drawings were in his possession at his death, and around a third of them survive today. This drawing shows Reni’s consummate skill as a draftsman in three chalks (black, red, and white), a technique seldom used by his contemporaries in Bologna. Suggesting forms with very few, lightly traced lines, the artist’s style is suggestive rather than descriptive. Reni seldom portrayed women from life, resulting in such works having slightly more uniform and idealized features than their male counterparts. A female figure in the typical Reni style, this head reappears countless times in paintings produced by Reni’s busy workshop throughout the 1620s.

Salvator Rosa led a turbulent life between Naples, Florence, and Rome, where he was closely acquainted with literary and theater figures. Rosa produced a corpus of drawings that are eclectic in style and eccentric in subject matter. This drawing is one of just a dozen head studies in pastel and the only one in the group to portray a woman. As the sitter—who may be Lucrezia Paolini (ca. 1620–1697), the artist’s partner for most of his life—is not wearing everyday clothes, the drawing may have been produced in the context of the Florentine Accademia dei Percossi (Academy of the Stricken), something of a combination of an artist’s studio and a salon of poets, playwrights, and painters, for whose members Rosa produced similar heads in pastel before his move to Rome in 1649.

Urged by his mentor Jean-Antoine Watteau to draw figures and combine them to form paintings “of his own choice and imagination,” Nicolas Lancret produced a number of drawings of independent figures that could be recombined in various ways against a landscape. Part of a suite of a dozen sheets depicting the same subject, known as la belle Grecque (the beautiful Greek)—often combined with le Turque amoureux (the amorous Turkish man)—this drawing in fact represents a woman dressed in Polish costume, whom the artist used as a stock figure in several paintings. Described by the Goncourt brothers as “the most delightful Lancret in the world” when they purchased it in 1858, this drawing was reproduced in print by Jules de Goncourt himself.

Giovanni Battista Piazzetta’s drawings far outnumber his paintings. He was chiefly known for book illustrations and head drawings—the so-called “character heads”—but this drawing may be one of just about twenty preparatory sheets by him to survive. Although it does not match any surviving painting by the artist, it bears close similarities with the head of the Virgin Mary in Piazzetta’s altarpiece in Santa Maria della Fava in Venice, painted in 1725–27. It is also possible, however, that Piazzetta made the sheet after the fact, recording his own painting in a drawing that, after adding the Virgin’s hands joined in prayer, he would later sell as an independent work or use as preparatory for a small devotional painting.

One of the most prominent and prolific painters in France during the reign of Louis XV, Boucher worked across many media and genres, playing a significant role in developing the painted pastoral as a genre in French art. Parisian patrons collected Boucher’s drawings during his life, and he may have made sheets like this as works of art in their own right. The figure relates to a number of the artist’s pastoral paintings, including La Musette (Musée du Louvre), in which the woman is joined by a shepherd and the drawing’s motif of the pierced heart is replaced with a small bagpipe held in the shepherd’s hand—also an amorous symbol. Boucher collaborated with printmakers to disseminate his compositions to a wider clientele, and this composition was translated into a print using the innovative technique of red chalk engraving. To the Goncourt brothers— famed art critics and collectors of the nineteenth century—this was one of the most beautiful studies made by Boucher.

In the early 1770s—at the same time that he was working on the first four large canvases of the Progress of Love—Fragonard produced a group of red chalk drawings that depict single figures of young women standing in landscapes. Not necessarily linked to paintings, these drawings were exhibited and sold as works of art in their own right. The women depicted have traditionally, though unconvincingly, been identified as either Fragonard’s daughter Rosalie or his sister-in-law Marguerite Gérard. The sitter is elegantly though simply dressed in a robe à l’anglaise (a large skirt, attached to a tight-fitting bodice and sleeves, decorated with a square neckline). Her pointed right shoe emerges from underneath the skirt, suggesting the possibility of movement toward the viewer.

A celebrated portrait painter, Vigée Le Brun witnessed major political and social changes during her seven-decades-long career. She traveled extensively through some of the most important European courts and was well known for her portraits, becoming, in the 1780s, one of Queen Marie-Antoinette’s favorite painters. As a young woman, she trained with her father, Louis Vigée, an established pastellist. She later worked primarily in oil but never fully abandoned the technique her father had taught her. In the 1780s, Vigée Le Brun created a number of pastel heads, preparatory for allegorical and mythological paintings. Signed and dated 1784, this drawing of a female head was probably made as a model for an allegorical figure for an oil painting—either lost or never executed.

Pierre-Paul Prud’hon is best known for his academic drawings on blue paper and for his allegorical paintings and portraits. An active Jacobin during the Reign of Terror, as well as an artist who benefitted from the patronage of both Napoleon and the restored Bourbon kings, Prud’hon always managed to work for the ruling powers in France. During the first half of the 1790s, he was interested in allegorical subjects. He created highly finished drawings, such as this, which were intended as works of art in their own right. This drawing originally had a pendant (now lost), representing Virtue struggling with Vice.

Jean-Baptiste Wicar lived and worked in Italy for most of his life, establishing himself as a portraitist and history painter. In the 1790s, he met Antoine-Christophe Saliceti (1757–1809), an ardent revolutionary who was one of Napoleon’s closest associates and, like Napoleon, from Corsica. Between 1803 and 1805, Saliceti was the French ambassador in Genoa, where he oversaw the takeover of the republic. In Wicar’s drawing of Saliceti, which may have been a model for a print, the ambassador is shown in civilian clothes, his left hand resting on Montesquieu’s Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline of 1734. An opening in the loggia behind him frames one of the symbols of Genoa, the Lanterna, at the time the tallest lighthouse in the world. In 1806, Saliceti moved to Naples, where he was appointed Minister of Police. There, he died, aged fifty-two, allegedly from poisoning.

One of the most significant landscape painters in British history, John Constable is best known for his scenes of the pre-industrial English countryside. This oil sketch was made in preparation for The Leaping Horse, the last of Constable’s celebrated “six-footers,” a series of large-scale paintings of scenes along the River Stour in the artist’s native Suffolk, known since his lifetime as “Constable country.” It is one of a number of drawn and painted sketches related to the final painting (Royal Academy of Arts, London), which was exhibited in 1825 and depicts the moment a barge horse (used to tow barges along waterways) leaps over a cattle fence blocking a towpath at river’s edge. It may have been in the present sketch that Constable first gave form to the idea of adding to the horse a rider, who in urging the animal over the fence strikes a dramatic pose—reminiscent of an equestrian portrait—lauded as a “stroke of genius.”

From 1856 to 1859, Degas was based in Italy, studying art from antiquity to the Renaissance and traveling around the country. In 1793, his grandfather, René-Hilaire Degas, had emigrated from France to Naples, where he established his banking business and his family, and between August and October 1857, the young Degas visited his family in Naples. While there, he produced a number of portraits—paintings and drawings—of his uncles, aunts, and cousins. Adelchi Morbilli (1837–1913) was the painter’s younger cousin. He was to become a prominent banker and the director of the Banca Nazionale in Naples. At the time of this drawing’s creation, Degas was under the influence of Ingres, whom he had met in Paris in 1855.

Gustave Caillebotte was a key figure in the rise and development of Impressionism. Born into a wealthy French family, he was best known during his lifetime for his support of his fellow Impressionists, helping them financially and collecting a considerable number of their paintings. Unlike other Impressionists (with the exception of Degas), Caillebotte was a keen draftsman. He created the compositions of his paintings after extensive work on drawings and sketches, some of which were likely based on photographs. This is a preparatory drawing for one of the figures in the background of Caillebotte’s best-known work—Paris Street; Rainy Weather (The Art Institute of Chicago), which was exhibited at the Third Impressionist Exhibition, in April 1877.