Figure Studies

About

A figure study is a drawing, painting or small model made to understand the body: its weight, gesture, proportion and the fall of light on it. Many were steps towards larger works. Michelangelo worked out the twisting pose of the Libyan Sibyl for the Sistine ceiling in red chalk from a male model around 1511, and Antoine Watteau filled sheets with figures in red, black and white chalk, a combination called trois crayons, then borrowed from them for his paintings.

European academies made the life class the core of training, and their finished nude drawings, called académies, followed set poses and careful shading. Others pursued the body in motion: Katsushika Hokusai's printed Manga sketchbooks (from 1814) catch people wrestling, bathing and working, and Eadweard Muybridge's Animal Locomotion (1887) gave artists sequences of moving models. Edgar Degas's pastel dancers and Egon Schiele's angular nudes kept the practice personal.