Edme Bouchardon’s street peddlers convey the humanity of an eighteenth-century city: vendors calling out their wares and services, singing musicians accompanied by portable instruments, and other street types. Made with red chalk applied in a range of gentle to forceful strokes, the drawings demonstrate the potential of the medium to convey qualities of flesh and the three-dimensionality of the human figure.
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Corresponding prints were made after the drawings; reversed in composition, they are nevertheless faithful to the originals. In crosshatched lines of black ink, they also reflect processes of etching and engraving.
Made with red chalk applied in a range of gentle to forceful strokes, the drawings demonstrate the potential of the medium to convey qualities of flesh and the three-dimensionality of the human figure. Corresponding prints were made after the drawings; reversed in composition, they are nevertheless faithful to the originals. In crosshatched lines of black ink, they also reflect processes of etching and engraving.
Credits:
Drawings: Études prises dans le bas peuple ou les Cris de Paris (Studies drawn in the lower folk or the Cries of Paris), 1737–1746. Leather-bound album including sixty original red-chalk drawings by Edme Bouchardon. The British Museum, London. Image © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved
Etchings: Études prises dans le bas peuple ou les Cris de Paris (Studies drawn in the lower folk or the Cries of Paris), 1737–1746. Etchings with engraving by comte de Caylus and Étienne Fessard after Edme Bouchardon. The Getty Research Institute
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