Notes
- Jean-Auguste-Domnique Ingres, Écrits sur l'art, Paris: La bibliothèque des arts, 1994, p.41.
- Nelson Goodman, ‘Sketch’, Languages of Art, (1962), Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Inc., 1976, pp.192–94.
- ibid.
- Paul Valé, ‘Petit discours aux peintres graveurs’, (1933), Œuvres II, Paris: Gallimard/Pléiade, 1960, pp. 1298–1301.
- ibid.
- Paul Valé, ‘Degas-Danse-Dessin’, (1934–38), Œuvres II, p. 1187.
- ibid, pp.1204–05.
- ibid, p.1205.
- Cennino Cennini, Trattato della pictura, c.1390, chapter 27, cited in Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann and Carolyn Logan, ‘The creative copy’, Creative Copies, New York: The Drawing Centre, 1988, exhibition catalogue, p.17.
- M. Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci: the Marvellous Works of Nature and Man, London: Dent, 1981, pp.124–25, cited in Louise Marshall, ‘Drawing the Renaissance body’ in Terence Maloon and Peter Raissis (eds), Michaelangelo to Matisse. Drawing the Body, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1999, pp.28, 37.
- Michel Deguy, ‘Watteau’, Poegrave;mes 11, 1970–1980, Paris: Gallimard, 1981, pp.169–70.
- Ingres, Écrits sur 1'art, p.45.
- It is beyond the parameters of this essay to deal with the subtle relationship to drawn and painted sketches and the debates about finish that had begun since the late eighteenth century. Suffice for the present to quote the major study by Albert Boime, The Academy and the Rise of French Painting in the Nineteenth Century, London: Phaidon, 1971, p.87:
- The rise of the sketch to the status of self-sufficient work returned in the displacement of the categorically distinct phases: the germinal experiment and final execution took place on the canvas simultaneously—no intermediate stage between impulse and act hampered the final expression. Certainly, spontaneity in vacuuo could produce nothing comprehensible without some rational control; but the applied sketch served as the model for the two phases into a comprehensible operation—the whole work completed under the impact of the first impression. The traditional phases were absorbed into one unifying act, which sustained the sketch as the central theme of the final product.
- The aesthetics of the sketch represented a synthesis of both stages, with the sketch itself emerging as a superior, rather than inferior production. While becoming valued as a picture in its own right, it still carried allusions to the definitive work in the traditional sense. The real conflict between the Academy and the experimental tendencies was precisely over the shift in emphasis from the executive to the generative phase. But once this shift was achieved, the sketch superseded the polished product as the ultimate objective of the artist. The resulting outcome constituted an inversion of the traditional values governing the creative act and its public display.