Enfant nu de dos 1867 - 1869

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes made this drawing of a nude child in France, sometime in the mid to late nineteenth century. On the face of it, it looks like a simple, innocent sketch, but it's worth thinking about the context in which a drawing like this would have been made. Art schools in Paris, which Puvis attended and later taught at, were at the time reinforcing long-standing academic traditions. One of these was life-drawing, where young artists drew nude figures to learn about proportion and anatomy. This wasn't necessarily about creating a realistic likeness, but about idealizing the human form. Studying these visual codes, and understanding their relationship to the wider social and institutional context of 19th-century France, is key to understanding the drawing. We can research the visual conventions of the French academy, and its approach to the male nude, through the school's archives. This kind of historical investigation is crucial to interpreting art of this period.