The Essence of Line: French Drawings from Ingres to Degas

by Jay M. Fisher (Editor)

Many patrons of the arts in nineteenth-century America built collections of paintings and sculpture imported primarily from England or Italy. Collectors in Baltimore―William Walters, George Lucas, the famous Cone sisters, among others―stand out in this milieu for having developed a strikingly different aesthetic for their homes and newly founded public institutions. These collectors looked to France for models of culture and, acting upon a remarkable understanding of the educational needs and working methods of artists, assembled extensive collections of drawings by French masters, from David to Daumier, Degas, and Cézanne. The Essence of Line offers the first comprehensive discussion of the formation of these collections and their significance for the history of French art. The book begins with essays by Jay M. Fisher, William R. Johnston, and Cheryl K. Snay that trace the history of collecting in Baltimore and afford new insights into the acquisition, display, and interpretation of drawings. In her essay, conservator Kimberly Schenck bridges the worlds of the collector and of the artist by examining the production and the use of drawing materials in an epoch of radical changes as much in technique as style. This book also provides a fully illustrated, scholarly catalogue for one hundred of the most important of the nineteenth-century French drawings now held by The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Walters Art Museum, and the Peabody Art Collection. Published on the occasion of an exhibition jointly organized by The Baltimore Museum of Art and The Walters Art Museum, this book presents a brilliant panorama of sketches, watercolors, and presentation drawings, many of them little known outside a small circle of experts. It is correlated with an online archive of the entire corpus of nineteenth-century French drawings in the holdings of these Baltimore museums. This volume has been published in conjunction with the exhibition The Essence of French Drawings from Ingres to Degas , organized by The Baltimore Museum of Art and the Walter Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland, and held The Baltimore Museum of Art, 19 June–11 September 2005 The Walters Art Museum 19 June–4 September 2005 Birmingham Museum of Art, 19 February–14 May 2006 Tacoma Art Museum, 9 June–17 September 2006.

389 pages, Paperback

First published July 31, 2005

Reviews

[Dorai]

This is a fantastic book, and while I'm glad I chanced upon it, I admit I did get misled by its title. This is not really a comprehensive history of the use of line in French drawings. It is a catalogue of only those French drawings that were acquired by the US city of Baltimore in the 19th century for its museums.

As an amateur pencil draftsman, I have been fascinated by the distinctive drawings of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and wanted to know more about his work. Ingres's pencil drawings from the 19c are some of the first we have in this genre, which is now gaining something of a popular renaissance in the YouTube art community. Ingres however differs significantly from his YouTube descendants. For one, he uses line only, unapologetically so, with none of the stumping, blending, and smudging favored by current artists to achieve photo- or hyperrealism. He also seems to restrict himself to a single, rather hard pencil instead of using a large variety of grades (to be fair, these may not have been available in the 19c). Differences in value are denoted purely by closeness of hatching, which is defiantly not photorealistic and requires active viewer interpretation. As with many early exponents of the pencil, he does not use extreme darks to make his drawings "pop", to use the silly modern expression. Instead, his viewer gets to let the drawing assume the necessary tonal variation through their own perception, by letting their eye and brain take in and be influenced by the detail over time. All this gives his drawings an austere minimalist flavor: they use all the resources that line, and line alone, has to offer in order to achieve verisimilitude, and allow the user the opportunity and pleasure of completing the representation themselves, in their own mind.

Unfortunately this book doesn't comprehensively document Ingres's or any other French artist's drawing œuvre. There appear to be only two Ingres drawings in the works acquired by the Baltimore museums. There are some other known artists in the catalogue, but it is clearly unrealistic to expect Baltimore to have the wherewithal to be able to get their better-known or more representative works.

The first part of the book does have a series of essays, and one of them is a history of 19c art supplies, including the pencil. One of the puzzles of pencils and pencil drawing is that it was France and not England that advanced their state of the art. One, or at least I, would have thought that the exuberant French would have been the more color-loving of the two nations, with the hard-nosed English favoring the monochromatic approach. Furthermore, it was England that contained the best and most abundant graphite mines at the time, and France was shut off from this supply because the two countries were at war. Despite this, it was the French who made great strides in monochromatic drawings using dry media, while the English hiked around their Lake districts with their watercolor cakes, sable brushes, and tiny bowls of water attached to the 19c equivalent of the fanny pack.

Scarcity seems to have galvanized the French toward the most significant innovations in pencil design, with Nicolas-Jacques Conté inventing the graded pencil as we still know it, mixing cheap clay and precious graphite in carefully varying proportions. The pencil with more clay than graphite was harder, cheaper, made a less dark mark, but also lent itself better to experiment with thin lines, as its point was sharp as a needle (recalling the medieval silverpoint) and longer-lasting. This may explain why 19c pencil drawings have this shimmering lightness about them. This lightness seems to have fallen out of style nowadays as commerce has made dark pencils readily available across the globe. (In art as elsewhere, less can often be more.)

Personally, I've been using the lighter, harder pencil and do not use any smudging tools. Part of it is definitely because it seems more forgiving of error and I lack the courage to commit too much unerasable dark on to the paper. Still, each approach seems to have its own æsthetic and charm, and I'm glad there is precedent for the lighter style in the 19c masters. Of course, they probably used it only because the commerce of the day did not give them another choice.