The Learned Draftsman: Edme Bouchardon - Hardcover

Kopp, Edouard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1606065041 ISBN 13: 9781606065044

Publisher: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2017

Synopsis

The celebrated French artist Edme Bouchardon (1698–1762) is primarily known as a sculptor today, but his contemporaries widely lauded him as a draftsman as well. Talented, highly innovative, and deeply invested in the medium, Bouchardon made an important contribution to the European art and culture of his time, and in particular to the history of drawing. Around two thousand of his drawings survive—most of which bear no relation, conceptual or practical, to his sculpture—yet, remarkably, little scholarly attention has been paid to this aspect of his oeuvre. This is the first book-length work devoted to the artist’s draftsmanship since 1910.
 
Ambitious in scope, this volume offers a compelling narrative that effectively covers four decades of Bouchardon’s activity as a draftsman—from his departure for Rome in 1723 as an aspiring student to his death in Paris in 1762, by which time he was one of the most renowned artists in Europe. His accomplished and dynamic style is analyzed and copiously illustrated in a series of five interrelated chapters that serve as case studies, each of which focuses on a coherent group of drawings from a particular period of Bouchardon’s career.
 

About this title

About the Author:

Édouard Kopp is the Maida and George Abrams Associate Curator of Drawings, Harvard Art Museums. He is the coauthor, with Scott Allan, of Unruly Nature: The Landscapes of Théodore Rousseau (Getty Publications, 2016) and the author of Capturing Nature’s Beauty: Three Centuries of French Landscapes (Getty Publications, 2009).
 

Review:

“Excellent.”—Art Newspaper
 

About this edition

• Publisher: J. Paul Getty Museum
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1606065041
• ISBN 13: 9781606065044
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 312