Academic Drawing. Encyclopedia

The book "Academic Drawing" is a legendary edition from the late 19th century titled "Drawing Manual" "Course of Drawing Training", created by Charles Bargue and Jean-Léon Gérôme between 1867 and 1870, and compiled in 2003 by art historian Gerald Ackerman. The editor of the reissue undertook a truly titanic effort to gather historical information about the prerequisites for the creation of the course and shed light on the life and work of Charles Bargue. Widely used until the early 20th century, the "Course of Drawing Training" is now a bibliographic rarity. The collection consists of more than 200 lithographs, copied by students around the world before they began drawing from life. The manual consists of several large format albums-tables, accompanied by a brief methodological note. It combines the achievements of realism and academicism. Training begins with drawing parts of the human face and the entire head, first in plaster, then from life. After that, students are encouraged to move on to drawing details of the human figure: first the hands and feet, then the entire arms and legs, and finally the torso. Drawing of the human figure also starts with a plaster cast, followed by a drawing of a living clothed figure. The course concludes with depictions of animals. The book is an outstanding educational resource for artists, forming the basis of European artistic education from the late 19th to early 20th centuries, and several generations of artists around the world grew up on this book. Among the artists who carefully studied Bargue's course were Pablo Picasso and Vincent Van Gogh, who copied all the lithographs from the manual in 1880/1881, and only part of them again in 1890. The book will be useful to a wide audience, including artists, students, art historians, and collectors.