Seated Male Nude

Seated Male Nude

Louis Lagrenée

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This sheet is of a kind sometimes called an academy, that is, a carefully executed drawing of a nude in a studio pose. Although academies were standard exercises for young artists, they were also produced by established draftsmen like Lagrenée, who was a professor at the Académie Royale at the time this drawing was made. As was typical, the model assumes a posture inspired by other works of art. The brooding expression and arrangement of the legs recall figures by Michelangelo, making Lagrenée's drawing both a study of the pose from life and an homage to the earlier master. The sharp contour and compact musculature give the figure a sculptural quality which is further enhanced by the hatching used to describe the volumes of the body and the shadows cast by the left arm and right leg.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.