Study of a Draped Woman Leaning on a Pedestal

In this powerful drawing, François Boucher’s model is so enveloped in yards of voluminous cloth that the fabric itself becomes the work’s subject and the drawing functions as an exercise in near abstraction. Boucher manipulated the black chalk to create outline and shadows, the white chalk to produce shimmering highlights, and the buff-colored paper to suggest flesh and give the fabric color and volume, in the process producing one of the finest drawings of 18th-century France. The sheet may have served as the model for Cleopatra in the artist’s etched frontispiece opening an edition of Pierre Corneille’s tragedy Rodogune, Princess of Parthia.