Incredible exhibition of eighteenth-century drawings from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (French National Library) at the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts. The point was to show drawings that were made for all sorts of purposes other than just sketches for paintings or to practice drawing human figures, which normally are just about only kind you ever see in museums and the reason why the drawings galleries are the boring ones you always skip (admit it!) This showed how exciting the drawings departments could be.
Above: Design for a toy carriage; shells by Émilie Bonnieu, one of the many women who had lucrative careers producing illustrations of natural specimens; Parisian street vendors with their cries notated
Scientific illustration; drawing by Louis XVIII of a woman milking a cow (yes actually drawn by the king); on-site sketches of beheadings at the storming of the Bastille, July 1789 by Anne-Louis Girodet
Building designs by Étienne-Louis Boullée: Monument to Isaac Newton (1, 2) as a hollow 500-foot diameter sphere lit only by small holes representing stars; close-up of the tomb (2); a library (3, 4); museum (5). These are his original ink drawings which he had copied into engravings which were widely distributed and you may have seen.
Cartoon of a woman having her hair styled by putti (cherubs) who are delivering a letter to her lover who looks in from a window while her husband’s face is echoed by the monkey next to him.
Designs for an ark where the torah is kept in a synagogue and for an altar for a new religion called Theophilanthropy by Jean-Jacques Lequeu; winnowing grain
Design for screen with episodes from Jean de la Fontaine’s adaptations of Aesop’s fables; auction catalogue with sketches of the paintings for sale in the margins; owls by Jean-Jacques Lequeu who was mainly an architect and left hardly any drawings of animals
Three different instruments related to drawing.
1) Physiognotrace, for producing life-size or nearly life-size portraits
2) Multi-function portable device that folds up into a trompe-l’oeil book that can be placed on shelf; it works as a camera obscura for sketching and as a device for viewing prints
3) Zograscope for viewing prints to give them an almost-three-dimensional effect although it’s not a true stereoscopic image
Fireworks and detail of peddler
Flowers from an album by Madeleine-Francoise Basseporte who held the high-level post of painter of the king’s vellums to Louis Philippe
Mineral by Émilie Bonnieu who did the shells at the top; design for a small theater
