Volume 21, Issue 2 | Summer 2022

Although landscape painting became a major genre in nineteenth-century art, it was not taught in French art schools. This essay traces the development of landscape pedagogy in the production of drawing manuals for the use of artists. Beginning as botanicals featuring schematic drawings of trees, these drawings developed into detailed studies delineating each landscape element in progressive steps, to be combined into completed works. Another set of manuals provided genre vignettes to enliven the landscape. Despite the widespread use and dissemination of these manuals throughout Europe and the Americas, artists consistently disavowed them, claiming that they had no master other than nature.

This article examines the crucial role of drawing on tracing paper for Eugène Delacroix’s preparation of lithographs and wood engravings. By demonstrating how he used the transparent support iteratively to develop his compositions, it explores conceptions of artistic process and originality in the nineteenth century and today. Turning attention to the artist’s understudied wood engravings and their interpretation by his contemporaries as “drawings on wood” troubles the present-day understanding of the medium and its proximity to the hand of the artist.

This article reconstructs the first major exhibition devoted to the drawings of J.-A.-D. Ingres, which was staged in Paris in 1861. The critical reaction to this event enacted an important reconceptualization of the role of drawing in Ingres’s work, as dessin came to be recognized less as the theoretical foundation of his achievement than as a crucial element in the material production of his art. In the process, assessments of Ingres’s draftsmanship converged not only with long-established tenets of the connoisseurship of drawings but also with an emergent modernist discourse that centered artistic accomplishment on values of truth to nature and truth to self.

This article seeks to examine the Paris-based dealer Richard Owen (1873­–1946) and his pivotal role in the history of collecting. Despite placing hundreds of drawings and paintings by French eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists into prominent American collections in the early part of the twentieth century, we know little of his dealing practice. Making use of archival evidence, this article aims to incorporate his story into the growing body of literature on this topic.