Customer Reviews

Charles Bargue and Jean-Leon Gerome: Drawing Course

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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!

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.

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!

The book is a complete reprint of the fabled but rare Drawing Course ("Cours de Dessin")of Charles Bargue and Jean-Leon 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.

The first two sections were for use in commercial or design schools to teach the principles of good taste based on classical form, the better to turn out competitive goods for commerce and industry. The last section, drawing from live models, was reserved for fine-art academies, opinion being that such training was beyond the grasp or need of humble commercial artists.

By and large the subjects for the plates are quite elevated. A prettily turned foot is taken from the first-century Medici Venus at the Uffizi in Florence; a sinewy shoulder and arm from Michelangelo's ''Moses'' at San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome; and the serenely spiritual-looking head of Anne of Brittany, wife of Louis XII, from her recumbent tomb figure by Giovanni Giusti (1515-22) in the Cathedral of Saint-Denis in Paris.

This portrait was a subject of fascination for van Gogh during a period when he was studying for the ministry. ''The expression of Anne of Brittany's face is noble, and reminds one of the sea and rocky coasts,'' he wrote to his brother in 1877, mentioning that he had hung the plate with her likeness in his room.

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 productive of 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 master painter, equipped with the skills to match his taste, talent and ideas. He became a master of telling details and exquisite tonal harmonies.

This book is a classic. It is used as a textbook in Florence, Italy for serious drawing classes with excellent results.

I saw the show that accompanied this book and it really re-invigorated me during a difficult time in my progress as an artist. Bargue is a unique figure in art history; his work is breathtaking and his career is an inspiring puzzle.

The plates from the drawing course are interesting, and certainly of historical value--I have often seen Picasso's student copies of Bargue's lithographs reproduced in books (but never credited!). However, it should be said that this course was created fairly late in the history of academic painting and did not contribute to the training of its most well-known artists, such as Bouguereau. Personally, I would not find the course very useful; in this day and age one can easily find excellent reproductions of the drawings that Bargue copied, as well as high-resolution photographs of antique sculptures. It is informative to see how Bargue simplified forms, but I think one would be better off drawing from life than from his lithographs.

It is Bargue's paintings that really deserve the most notice, although they seem to have been included in this book (and in the exhibition) almost as an afterthought. His technique is exquisite beyond description, comparable to the very best of the Dutch masters. The plates, although good, don't begin to capture the impossible perfection of his work--I doubt that any reproduction could. He describes surfaces and textures with a graceful delicacy that I've never seen surpassed. His draftsmanship and sense of gesture are understated yet flawless, and his compositions--consisting of orientalist and historical genre subjects--are delightful if not particularly original.
It is distressing that so little is known of his life, other than the fact that he was, perplexingly, rather unsuccessful. He seems to have been a late bloomer; I was fascinated to see that none of his existing paintings were produced before the age of 42. Before that, he primarily worked as a graphic artist, specializing in mediocre soft-porn lithographs. Also intriguing is the fact that, other than his unclear association with Gerome, he had no direct ties to the academy. In fact, it is unknown where he studied... very strange considering how skilled he was--his technique blows most of his contemporary academicians out of the water. He is a useful example for the present day "neo-neo" classicical/realist painters who bemoan the loss of traditional academic schools.

This is a fantastic book. I just ordered it from the Dahesh Musuem in New York for $75. I don't understand why the used book sellers are selling the book for so much.

This excellent, but unfortunately out of print book, is a mix of art instruction and history, presenting Charles Bargue's complete drawing course, annotating it with technical information for the student, and explaining the tastes and philosophies of its time.

The Bargue - Gerome course aims to teach the drawing skills of classical realism, accurate, sculptural, beautiful without being decorative.

Ackerman's notes are practical and specific, noting such points as how a particular form has been observed and simplified, and discussing the handling of particular poses.

The Drawing Course isn't, as its name might imply, a set of sequential lessons, but a provision of resources and information. Some readers may find it difficult for this reason. The organization needed for a book with full-page illustrations - such as the separation of plates and text - can make navigation of the book awkward initially, and some fundamental information - such as the method of cast drawing and sight size drawing - is at the back of the book.

This should not put off the serious student. Be aware that, if using this text for self-instruction, you'll need to be confident enough to gather information and apply it to your own drawing practice.

This caution aside, the thorough notes in this text are written in a highly readable and informative style, offering invaluable insights into academic drawing technique.

Unfortunately, when I tried to order some copies from the Dahesh Museum for my art students, they told me that they had run out of copies and that this great book is out of print.

According to the musuem, it will be reprinted "soon", possibly by the end of 2007. Until then, if you don't want to pay $150 and up for this I'd suggest checking Ebay as they seem to come up for sale regularly there.

The Drawing Course(Cours de dessin); produced with the collaboration of Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904), France's greatest academic master; and designed to prepare beginning art students to draw from "nature", that is, objects, both natural and man-made, inthe real world. When the Drawing Course was first published (Parts I and II beginning in 1868; Part III in 1871) it was assumed that the imitation of nature was the primary goal of the artist, and that the most important subject was the human body.

The original Drawing Course contained 197 loose-leaf lithographic plates of drawings after casts, master drawings, and male models. These sheets, which were widely disseminated and very affordable when first published in the late 19th century (either individually or bound) are now quite rare. The 160 original plates featured in the exhibition have been generously loanedby Bordeaux's Musée Goupil, which possesses two complete sets of the Course.

Bargue's own paintings and drawings confirm his skills as a master artist, skills which he himself refined as he produced the Course. Bargue, therefore, can justly be called the first graduate of the Bargue-Gérôme Drawing Course. A Crisis in Art Education The Drawing Course was a response to widespread dissatisfaction with the skills of French commercial art students in the mid-19th century. The root of the problem was believed to be a deficiency of taste--which in turn reflected the inferiority of models that students had been given to copy, a basic element in drawing education. In 1865, French critics called for "a complete reorganization of the teaching of drawing" that would explicitly redress the dearth of appropriate models, and help French students of industrial design and decorative arts compete in an international market. Goupil & Cie, Paris, the most important art dealer and publisher of its time, seized the opportunity to develop a new curriculum for this market and quickly developed the Drawing Course, a series of lithographic plates that would foster the evolution of taste through the study of classical form, which was defined by the style of antique statuary. The work was advertised as a collaboration between Jean-Léon Gérôme andCharles Bargue. While Gérôme certainly contributed his celebrity to the enterprise, his actual role may have been supervisory. The drawings were executed by members of the Gérôme circle, and all were copied onto stone by Bargue.

The three parts of the Drawing Course correspond to a widely accepted sequence of art education in the 19th century. Part I, Drawing After Casts (Modeles D'Apres la Bosse) and Part II, Copying Master Drawings (Modeles d'Apres Les Maîtres), began publication in 1868 and were intended for students of industrial and decorative arts--the very ones whose deficiencies argued so forcefully for the Course's necessity--as well as beginning fine arts students. Part III, Charcoal Exercises in Preparation for Drawing the Male Academic Nude or Académie (Exercices au Fusain Pour Preparer a l'Etude de l'Academie d'Après Nature)presented charcoal sketches of the male nude.

It was completed in 1871 and intended for fine art students only--drawing live models was discouraged if not forbidden in most European and American schools of design. Published without instructive text because they were meant to be used primarily in art schools, the Drawing Course sold briskly from its first publication, and continued to do well for at least three decades, with individual plates made available by Goupil & Cie and its successors until the firm's final dissolution in 1921. Its primary purchasers were institutions: the city of Paris ordered a special printing for its schools almost immediately after the first plates were finished, and the Drawing Course was adopted in Great Britain by the extensive system of schools and academies supervised by the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum).

Its influence was also widespread in America -- the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, for example, bought Parts I and II of the Drawing Course in 1876, the year Thomas Eakins began teaching there. Self-trained artists could also easily make use of the plates, progressing in an orderly, rational sequence through a program designed to develop their technical skills, while mature artists would use the plates to hone their skills, as a trained pianist might return to the discipline of Czerny's piano exercises.

Mirroring the selection of casts found in the collections of the best European and American art schools, most plates in Part I of the Drawing Course are copies after famous antique sculptures. They were meant to guide a student through a pedagogically-grounded sequencefrom plates depicting separate body parts -- eyes, ears, noses, feet, arms, and legs, with great emphasis on the head - to partial, and then complete male and female figures. Key to understanding this section are Bargue's angular schemata that lie to the left of the finisheddrawings in most of these plates, simplifying the composition of the cast, suggesting reference lines and geometric configurations that the student might use in organizing the contours of his own drawing.

Several of Pablo Picasso's student copies of Part I are reproduced in this section of the exhibition. Nineteenth-century art schools considered a collection of plaster casts a necessity; students were required to draw from them before they were allowed to turn their attention to livemodels. Museums likewise considered such collections essential to their mission. Within 30 years of its founding in 1870, the Metropolitan Museum of Art had amassed more than 2,000 plaster casts, which they kept on continuous view until the late 1930's. For pedagogical purposes, casts offered ideal drawing models for the student. They were immobile, and their white or light coloration allowed easy reading of light and shadow.

The drawings in Part II were selected both for their aesthetic value and their demonstration of specific techniques that could be learned in practice. Bargue made most of the plates for this part of the Drawing Course from copies rendered by artists again chosen by Gérôme from among his colleagues and students. The originals include works of the Old Masters--Michelangelo, Raphael, Filippino Lippi, and Hans Holbein the Younger, among them--as well as Bargue's contemporaries -- academic luminaries such as Gérôme, his teachers Paul Delaroche and Charles Gleyre, and other artists represented or employed by Goupil & Cie.

The copying of drawings by distinguished artists had a long history. Under the guild system that predated the French Revolution, apprentices copied drawings, studies, and travelnotations from their masters' portfolios. Beyond its advantages to the master--students thus trained could assist in his projects without noticeable discrepancies in style--the practice allowed the apprentice to develop a personal repertoire of subjects and poses for eventual use in his own work. This practice continued in the studios of the academic masters of the nineteenth century, and, of course, was famously reinterpreted a century later in AndyWarhol's "Factory". Twenty-eight of the 70 drawings are after Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/98-1543), said to be a favorite of Gérôme's.

Like all Old Master drawings in Part II, these are "interpretations" of Holbein, rather than precise facsimiles. They have beenfreshened and made whole: faded lines have been strengthened and fading coloration translated into lines so that they are easier to copy.

Part III: Drawing the Nude Charcoal Exercises in Preparation for Drawing the Male Academic Nude or Académie (Exercices au Fusian Pour Preparer a L'etude de L'Académie d'Après Nature) or Part III ofthe Drawing Course, contained 60 plates. Published in 1871, it is Bargue's work alone. As the plates of Part I prepared the student to work from plaster casts, the drawings in Part III represent the final step before depicting the nude male model in a "noble and classic" pose. (As the most representative product of the academic curriculum, such drawings, or academies,became synonymous with their institutions.)

Seen as preparatory notations to assist in the creation of polished drawings, rather than finished works themselves, these plates show the student how to capture a figure's most salient points. The models assume traditional poses that express a catalogue of human emotions -- thinking, beseeching, sincerity, melancholy, despair -- emotions that all academically trained artists were taught to render through specific poses and expressions. Such poses as taught by Bargue were often reused by figurative painters throughout their careers.

Vincent van Gogh, for example, copied the plates of Part III many times during his career. Excerpts from his letters to his brother Theo, reproduced in the exhibition's wall text, underscore the hold that the "Bargues" had on the artist. In 1881, he wrote to Theo, "Careful study & repeated copying of Bargue's Exercises au fusain have given me a better insight into figure-drawing. I have learned to measure and to see and to look for the broad outlines so that, thank God, what seemed utterly impossible to me before is gradually becoming possible to me now...I no longer stand as helpless before nature as I used to do.

Little is known of Bargue's early life, although it seems likely that he received much of his training at home, within a family of professional lithographers. While working as a lithographer for Goupil & Cie, he became acquainted with Gérôme and his circle, and was soon included in a group of talented painters employed to make smaller copies ("reductions") of popular paintings. After Bargue received the commission for the Drawing Course, the next five years of his life, from 1865-1870, were almost entirely devoted to that single project.

While the teaching of traditional academic practices almost died out between 1880 and 1950, Bargue's curriculum helps us reconstruct what generations of traditionally trained representational artists were taught to copy and admire. But the Drawing Course is no mere dusty artifact in the archeology of art education. The explosion of figurative work being made today by young artists; the energy of new academies, ateliers, and other institutions for training artists; and the growing critical appreciation of the importance of drawing for artists, illustrators, and even animators, promise a new life for Bargue's comprehensive curriculum. With the republication of this groundbreaking work, a rich and vibrant tradition will be sustained.

I too have purchased the Charles Bargue Book, and although I am thrilled with the plates, I agree, the notes supplied are not quite enough.

For anyone seriously interested in doing the Bargue Drawing Course, I highly recommend supplementing it with "The Bargue Drawing Companion DVD", produced by Fernando Freitas, of the Academy of Realist Art in Toronto, where the course is taught as part of the drawing curriculum. It will guide you through all the relevant stages of the Bargue drawing technique, and includes printable pages of course notes. As far as I know, no one is offering anything comparable.

Having the Bargue Drawing Companion insruction in DVD form makes it particularly useful as a reference tool. You get to watch a real master in process, which is especially useful when it comes to his technique for the rendering of form. The DVD covers the preparation of materials, the essentials of measurement and proprtion, 'drawing in the flat', the principles of light and dark, and the final rendering of values and forms. [...]