Charles Bargue with the collaboration of Jean-Léon Gérôme

This book is a complete reprint of the fabled but rare Drawing Course (Cours de Dessin) of Charles Bargue and Jean-Léon Gérôme, published in Paris in the 1860s and 1870s. For most of the next half-century, this set of nearly 200 masterful lithographs was copied by art students worldwide before they attempted to draw from a live model. This book will be valuable to a wide range of artists, students, art historians and collectors, even as it introduces them to the hitherto-neglected master, Charles Bargue.

The Drawing Course is separated into three sections, in an ascending order of difficulty. The first section consists of lithographs by Bargue after casts of sculptures, mostly antique examples that present the structure of the human body with remarkable clarity and intelligence. The second part contains the lithographs that Bargue made after master drawings by Renaissance and modern artists, and the third section almost 60 exemplary drawings of nude male models.

Experienced artists will recognize the skill and insight with which Bargue solved problems of drawing from nature; they will want to copy these plates to sharpen their professional skills. For art students, the Drawing Course is a practical introduction to realistic drawing based on the observation of nature, a course blissfully free of the usual charts and schemata requiring memorization and often producing stultification. For art historians, the Drawing Course documents the longstanding tradition of accurate draftsmanship prized by the late nineteenth-century figure painters who stood at the convergence of classicism and realism.

This volume concludes with a biography of Charles Bargue and a preliminary catalogue of his paintings, accompanied by reproductions of works both located and lost. Bargue started his career as a lithographer reproducing the drawings of commercial illustrators for a popular market in comic, sentimental and erotic subjects. By working with Gérôme, and by preparing the plates for this Drawing Course, Bargue was transformed into a superb painter, equipped with the skills to match his taste, talent and ideas. He became a master of telling details and exquisite tonal harmonies.

Gerald Ackerman is a well-known scholar of academic art of the nineteenth century. He is the author of several books published by ACR Edition. Most renowned is The Life and Work of Jean-Léon Gérôme, of which a third French edition is in preparation (La Vie et l'oeuvre de Jean-Léon Gérôme, Paris, 2000), as is a paperback condensation in English (Jean-Léon Gérôme, His Life, His Work). Mr. Ackerman has also published Les Orientalistes de l'Ecole britannique and American Orientalists.

His collaborator on this volume is Graydon Parrish, the figure painter well known for his widely reproduced allegory, Remorse, Despondence, and Acceptance of an Early Death (1997-1999, Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Massachusetts).