My Gerome Bargue Drawing Course

I have been taking various life and cast drawing classes with Scott Nickerson at Colorest in Red Bank New Jersey.  Scott would bring in examples to illustrate various points, which turned out to come from the Greome Bargue Drawing Course.  The following are a cast and a life drawing example that I have done in Scott's classes.

Greome was of course a famous classic painter from the mid nineteenth century in Paris.  He was one of the leaders of the famous Parisian Salon Exhibitions.  Bargue was one of his students.  Bargue generated a series of lithograph plates based on drawings by Gerome and himself.  These plates of drawings were used as one of the first steps in a classic art education in Europe for many years.  After one could copy these drawings, they would progress to drawings from casts, followed by drawing from life.

I purchased a copy of the drawing course in the book "Charles Bargue and Jean-Leon Gerome by Gerald Ackerman and Graydon Parrish".

On a recent vacation trip in Europe I decided to use my spare time to draw from the Bargue Plates.  At the end of the trip, after having done many drawings, we visited a wonderful VanGogh show in Amsterdam.  I was shocked to find that the first work in the show was a set of drawings that VanGogh had done from the Bargue plates!  It turns out he did the course twice in his early phase of self education!  Later in reviewing material I picked up on Picasso in Barcelona, I learned that Picasso had also done much of the course, when he attended the art school in Barcelona.  I suddenly felt that I must have been spending my time on the correct material.

The course gives specific instructions on how to approach the drawing process, which you can read in the book that I referenced above.  The course starts with drawing body parts, such as ears, eyes, facial profiles, followed by hands, arms, legs, and feet.  It then moves on to drawing heads.  The next phase of the course is to copy works of old masters.  Finally, the course concludes with the drawing of figures.

The following are some of the drawings that i did  while on my vacation trip.

First, i did ears and eyes.

Followed by facial profiles:

Followed by hands, arms, and legs:

I then moved along to heads:

Finally, I arrived at drawing figures:

At the end of the trip, when i discovered that Picasso had also copied the Bargue plates, I sketched one of Picasso's watercolor portraits on the plane as we flew home.

All in all, we really enjoyed the trip, and I learned a lot about art and drawing!