Even if figuration and the use of contour lines continued to predominate until the end of the 19th century, the practice of drawing experienced significant change. Many artists emerged from the studio to work outdoors, drawing quickly to capture nature and everyday scenes full of movement and changes in light and colour. By the mid-century, classical models had largely given way to unidealised depictions, and the demand for highly finished drawings to more spontaneous works. Nevertheless, artists remained committed to drawing, both as preparation for work in other media and as an art-form in its own right.

NEO-CLASSICISM

Neo-Classicism, which had developed in the 18th century as a reaction against Baroque and Rococo, reached new heights in the Napoleonic era.  Drawings by the French painter Jacques Louis David (1748-1825) and Italian sculptor Antonio Canova (1757-1822) describe the idealise heroic figures from classical antiquity, while the sinuous, clean lines of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) depict handsome but inscrutable models such as Louise de Broglie, the Countess d’Haussonville and Merry-Joseph Blondel.  The drawings of the English sculptor John Flaxman (1755-1826) and North American painter Benjamin West (1738-1820) present a different variant of Neo-Classical style in which the depiction of the natural world seems to look across to the work of Romantics .

ROMANTICISM

Although the seeds of Romanticism were sown in the visionary paintings of Blake and Fuseli, it was only at the turn of the 19th century that artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, J.M.W. Turner, and to some extent John Constable, began to depict wild landscapes and seascapes which suggested “a longing for the unbounded and the undefinable” (Isaiah Berlin, 1965). Human beings, in these paintings, are insignificant compared to nature which, contrary to the teachings of the Enlightenment, cannot be dominated. In the United States these ideas were embraced Hudson River School artists such as Thomas Cole (1801-1848) and Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900). The roots of Romanticism in France lay in historical paintings commissioned to celebrate Napoleon’s victories, but within a few decades artists such as Théodore Gericault (1791-1824) and Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) were producing more critical works. The mid-19th century British Pre-Raphaelite movement also held to a Romantic conception of nature and individual expression, but its primary concern was to reject the classical tradition which artists such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) traced back to Raphael.

 REALISM

The Realist movement began after the 1848 Revolution in France with artists such as Gustave Courbet and Honoré Daumier depicting common labourers in naturalistic scenes as a reaction to  the idealisation of both Romanticism and Neo-Classicism. Charcoal and graphite, which had always played a role in preparatory drawings, now assumed greater importance, used as if to coat the images in soot and grime. Daumier’s watercolours of first-, second- and third-Class railway carriages are particularly memorable, not least because it is the second-class passengers who look most unhappy while the ones in third-class seem resigned to their fate. The North American Winslow Homer, who studied in Paris in the 1860s, took the Realists’ ideas back home but himself employed a brighter palette to create scenes which spoke of affection rather than anger.

IMPRESSIONISM

A reaction against the academic painting and drawing which had dominated artistic practice since the Renaissance, Impressionism sought to record ordinary life, accurately and objectively and to capture the transient effects of light, colour, and movement. Artists such as Claude Monet (1840-1926), Camille Pisarro (1830-1903) and Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) often worked outdoors (‘en plein air’), making quick and delicate marks with pencils and finely sharpened chalks, and often adding in touches of colour in watercolour and pastel. Like Morisot, the North American Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) was one of a new generation of artists to depict “New Women” at a time when women’s rights were a topic of increasing interest. Edgar Degas (1834-1917) and Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) maintained a traditional, linear approach, but, as the drawings below reveal, they too were fascinated by movement. Degas’s dancers are amongst the most evocative drawings ever produced.