Preliminary Studies for Portrait of William Makepeace Thackeray (in Sketch Book With Drawings on Twenty-six Leaves) 1850 - 1860

This is a page from a sketchbook, filled by Frederic Leighton with studies for a portrait of William Makepeace Thackeray. The artist used a humble pencil on paper, a readily available material for quick studies and sketches. What’s interesting here is how the nature of the material informs Leighton’s practice. Pencil allows for rapid, iterative work. You can see the artist trying out different angles and capturing fleeting expressions. The softness of the graphite lends itself to shading and creating tonal variations. Sketchbooks like this one offer us a glimpse into the artist’s process, and reveal the labor and thought behind a finished portrait. It challenges the traditional hierarchy between ‘finished’ art and preliminary sketches. After all, the artist's hand and the marks on the page testify to the intimate connection between thought, material, and artistic creation.