Charles Bargue and Jean-Leon Gerome: Drawing Course [Hardcover]

Gerald M. Ackerman (Author), Graydon Parrish (Editor), Charles Bargue (Drawings)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 286770166X | ISBN-13: 978-2867701665 | Publication Date: October 31, 2007 | Edition: 2nd

The Bargue-Gerome Drawing Course is a complete reprint of a famous, late nineteenth century drawing course. It contains a set of almost two hundred masterful lithographs of subjects for copying by drawing students before they attempt drawing from life or nature. Consequently it is a book that will interest artists, art students, art historians, and lovers and collectors of drawings. It also introduces us to the work and life of a hitherto neglected master: Charles Bargue. The Drawing Course consists of three sections. The first consists of plates drawn after casts, usually of antique examples. Different parts of the body are studied in order of difficulty, until full figures are presented. The second section pays homage to the western school of painting with lithographs after exemplary drawings by Renaissance and modern masters. The third part contains almost sixty academies or drawings after nude male models, all original inventions by Bargue, the lithographer. With great care, the student is introduced to continually more difficult problems in the close observing and recording of nature. Practiced professional artists will see at once the problems of representation that are approached by Bargue, and they will delight in his solutions. Figure painters will copy the plates to keep in tune; so to speak, much as pianists practice the exercises of Czerny before performing Beethoven. Art students will find it a practical and progressive introduction to realistic figure drawing. Art historians can learn by studying these drawings just what was prized in late 19th century figure painting. They will recognize the reliance upon tradition by the use of antique sculptures as models in the first part: Antiquity is here used, not to impose a classical style, but as an aid in seeing the structure of the human body with clarity and intelligence. The result is a convergence of Classicism and Realism. There are no numerical proportional charts, perspective boxes or geometrical schemata to memorize. All the techniques and schemata are developed out of and for the object or person in view. The drawings are splendid; beautiful; not simply products of assiduity, but of careful observation and the wish to transcribe and communicate the beauty of nature and light, as well as the manifold appearances of the human body. These are objectives that will touch and move any careful reader of drawings, and the figurative arts. Charles Bargue started his career as a lithographer of drawings by hack artists for a popular market in comic, sentimental and soft-porn subjects. By working with Gerome, and in preparing the plates for the course, Bargue was transformed into a spectacular painter of single figures and intimate scenes; a master of precious details that always remain observation and never became self-conscious virtuosity, of color schemes that unified his composition in exquisite tonal harmonies. The last part of the book is a biography of Bargue, along with a preliminary catalogue of his paintings, accompanied by reproductions of all that have been found and of many of those lost.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Gerald Ackerman was born in California. He completed his studies at the University of California at Berkeley, then at the University of Munich and finally at Princeton, where he received his PhD. For twenty years, he was a professor of art history at Pomona College in California. He is a specialist of Gerome and published studies on other 19th century American and European artists, as well as on the theory of academic art.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Art Creation Realisation; 2nd edition (October 31, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 286770166X
• ISBN-13: 978-2867701665
• Product Dimensions: 11.2 x 10.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #589,323 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

59 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Overall a great buy, February 20, 2007

By 

Paul SR (CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Charles Bargue and Jean-Leon Gerome: Drawing Course (Hardcover)

The Bargue Drawing Course has an interesting history. To understand it properly, some understanding of how academic art was taught in the late 19th century, when it was published, will help.

A typical art education in the 19th century would begin with drawing from casts of Greek and Roman statues. This was supposed to teach students not only to draw well, but to appreciate the noble beauty of classical sculpture, and to be educated by copying from example in what was then considered to be 'good taste'. Following a period of drawing from casts, students would move on to copying old masters. This education was common to all the visual arts, including commercial variants like industrial design. Once this thorough grounding in good taste had been achieved, only 'fine art' students would then go on to draw and paint from the nude.

The Bargue Drawing Course is split into three parts, roughly following this pattern. The first part is a series of drawings from casts, the second part a series of copies of old master drawings. The third part would only have been undertaken by fine art students and is a series of what we now call 'life drawings' - drawings of the male nude in various poses. Students were expected to copy these drawings with great accuracy, producing work which was to all intents and purposes indistinguishable from the originals, assuming they were up to the job.

In France in the 1860s there was a general official hoo-ha about the low standard of the work being produced by the students at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. The consensus was that this was due to the low standard of the work the students were copying. Goupil and Cie, the prominent Parisian art dealers at the time (and Theo Van Gogh's employers and for a while Vincent's too before he became a painter himself,) saw a commercial opportunity, and organised the production of the Bargue Drawing Course to answer the need for better models for the students to work from. It did pretty well for them apparently, for thirty years or so, but fell out of favour when those pesky post impressionists stopped worrying about how accurate their drawing was and started worrying about the expression of their personal vision instead.

In simple terms, academic art institutions and ateliers at that time were mainly concerned with reproducing nature. In fact, this idea that the goal of art was to copy nature, either realistically or in an idealised version, had held sway pretty much since the time of Aristotle.

To be fair, Medieval art got a bit wayward and tended to subjugate the faithful reproduction of nature to the communication of the message (Christianity), but the artist was then even less a creative individual in the sense that we're used to thinking about them now, he was a workman. The Renaissance marked a return to the natural and idealised forms of classical Greek and Roman art, but now often in the service of the Church. Those poor Renaissance artists had to spend lots of time and energy re-learning what their Medieval brothers and sisters had forgotten, how to represent nature faithfully. On the plus side though, they were beginning to be seen less as low class artisans and were gradually becoming invested with a higher social status. Michelangelo in particular was instrumental in this change of the perception of the artist. All the same, it wasn't until the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the expression of the personal vision of the artist became more important than the faithful reproduction of nature.

This book is a reproduction of the entire Bargue drawing course, together with some extra information about Bargue himself and a few other tidbits, including excellent coverage of the technique of sight size drawing. According to the introduction of this publication, there were a few competitors on the market at the time, but the Bargue course had something extra going for it. It managed to straddle the two main camps in academic art at the time, one of idealisation of nature along the lines of Raphael, what you might call classicism, the other a part of the growing realist movement which held that art should be honest, including being truthfully ugly if the subject was ugly. Bargue's drawing style represents a synthesis of these two camps, showing his models as they really are, but with nothing so ugly that it would outrage the idealists. Bargue also had the knack of simplifying his forms in order to make them clearer and easier to copy for the aspiring student.

Although it's a very good thing that this course has been republished, the book does have a couple of shortcomings in it's present form. Firstly, the plates are much smaller than the originals, which means that they have to be blown up if you want to do a proper job of copying them. Now that's alright for the bigger plates which are A4 size, but some of them are only a couple of inches high so that the publishers can squeeze a few on a page. It seems pretty obvious to me that if you reproduce something that small you'll lose a lot of the detail because the resolution (in dpi) of these reproductions is the same as for the large ones, so these plates may as well have not been included at all in my opinion. To be fair I haven't tried it yet, but it does seem to go against common sense. I wonder if they were included to justify the "in it's entirety" selling point.

Secondly, it's in book form, with a hard spine. These plates are supposed to be taped up onto a drawing board with the copies done beside them, the same size, the better to judge the accuracy of the copies. Of course you can get them blown up, as I've done, but they're also difficult copy cleanly with no distortion on a flat bed scanner because of the book format. The printer I took them to had to try a couple of times for some of them, it's not a thin book.


Given that these drawings are supposed to give one an appreciation of what good taste was over a hundred years ago, you could be forgiven for thinking that the book is hopelessly out of date. I can't disagree on that score, but what saves this book for me and makes it worthwhile is the quality of the drawings. Bargue was a superb draughtsman, it fairly drips off the pages, with plate after plate of beautifully realised drawings. For many of the plates, a one or two stage simplification of the final finished drawing is included, breaking the drawing down into simplified forms. I haven't got that far yet (I'm still on the first plate,) but I do believe that this will be very useful when it comes to seeing the building blocks of shapes in the real world.

It must be said also that the publishers do make the point that the book is only partly intended as a course for students. It's also intended to be used by historians and also simply to be enjoyed by lovers of fine drawing, and on that score it delivers.

Apart from the reservations I've cited above, I'm happy I've got hold of a copy of this book. Of course, as with all teaching materials, you can't absorb the knowledge and skills through osmosis by sitting in the same room as the book or just flicking through the pages. You have to get your charcoal out and draw. A lot.

That the beautiful drawings in this book are being brought to a wider audience is a very good thing. The manner in which it has been done is considerably less impressive. I hope another publisher with a better idea of how to go about their business produces a more usable, better constructed one.

46 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a treasury of lost teachings, February 16, 2004

By 

"benj9" (Toronto, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Charles Bargue and Jean-Leon Gerome: Drawing Course (Hardcover)

This book is essential for those students who wish to study art seriously, and to make themselves capable enough draftmen in order to paint. It is a complete reproduction of the "fabled but rare" drawing course used in Gerome's studio in nineteenth century Paris, comprising multiple levels of cast drawings, master-copies and linear life-drawings designed specifically to train the student's eye for painting.

The plates are meant for study, to be copied by the student for several purposes; mainly serving as an introduction to the academic drawing process, but also as an artistic and anatomical reference for showing what is essential in form - Bargue, as a teacher, is unmatched in this respect.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the study and/or appreciation of fine drawing, and cannot thank the Dahesh museum enough for compiling it!

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a treasury of lost teachings, February 16, 2004

By 

"benj9" (Toronto, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Charles Bargue and Jean-Leon Gerome: Drawing Course (Hardcover)

This book is essential for those students who wish to study art seriously, and to make themselves capable enough draftmen in order to paint. It is a complete reproduction of the "fabled but rare" drawing course used in Gerome's studio in nineteenth century Paris, comprising multiple levels of cast drawings, master-copies and linear life-drawings designed specifically to train the student's eye for painting.

The plates are meant for study, to be copied by the student for several purposes; mainly serving as an introduction to the academic drawing process, but also as an artistic and anatomical reference for showing what is essential in form - Bargue, as a teacher, is unmatched in this respect.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the study and/or appreciation of fine drawing, and cannot thank the Dahesh museum enough for compiling it!