Graphite on archival quality grey canson mi-teints paper

30cm x 40 cm

£325

Charles Bargue ‘cours de dessin’ is a famous and fabled publication of the late nineteenth century. Divided into three parts, it contains 197 lithographic ‘plates’ of precise drawings after casts and master drawings.

Despite being both rare and arcane today, the Bargue-Gerome Drawing Course is one of the most significant documents of the last great flowering of figure painting in Western art, which took place in the late nineteenth century.

Like the curriculum of the nineteenth-century Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, whose ideals it shared, it was designed so that the student using it could eventually choose to render nature in both idealistic and realistic fashions.