Kneeling Nude Youth with Raised Clasped Hands 1725 - 1741

Etienne Jeaurat made this red chalk drawing, Kneeling Nude Youth with Raised Clasped Hands, in France sometime in the 18th century. This drawing likely served an academic purpose. In Jeaurat’s time, the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture controlled the official art world and dictated a rigid hierarchy of genres and subjects. At the core of the academy’s teaching was life drawing, with the male nude being the ultimate model of aesthetic and anatomical perfection. Jeaurat challenges this perfection by showing a figure in a moment of supplication and perhaps even shame. He is turned away from us, head covered, as if hiding. To understand this drawing further, one could look into the curriculum of the French Royal Academy. We might ask, were students encouraged to draw figures in such emotional states? Were there alternative, non-academic art worlds at the time that embraced less conventional imagery? These are some of the questions we can ask to better understand the social life of this image.