Four Figure Studies

Comparable in format and style to studies in the Italian sketchbooks of young Jacques-Louis David, which he executed when he was studying in Rome from 1775 to 1780, these eight drawings might be by an artist in his circle there. Copying antique sculptures was a major activity of pensioners at the French Academy in Rome, and these quickly sketched drawings seem to record this fundamental academic exercise. The figures' frenzied poses, fluttering drapery, and subtle modeling with wash suggest that they were drawn after antique bas reliefs--a battle of the centaurs, or scene of bacchic revelry, for example—with the artist isolating individual figures on the page from the complex sculpted context.