Exhibitions at the Sir John Soane’s Museum aim to open new insights into architectural and artistic practice during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and the extraordinary house which holds Soane’s collections never fails to provide fresh inspiration with each visit. The current offering is particularly suited to the venue, as it celebrates the tradition of drawing from the Antique, which was fundamental to artistic training, and to Soane’s own didactic methods. The largest number of international loans to the museum to date have been assembled, to provide an overview which spans the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. First shown at the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, Netherlands, the exhibition of thirty-two items includes many rarely seen works from the private collection of contemporary art dealer Katrin Bellinger. Many other images may be familiar from reproductions, but are here set within a broad time scale and with the specific focus on student artists as they studied and copied Roman and Greek sculpture.

The history of art education in England is commonly grounded within an eighteenth-century context and with reference to the founding of the Royal Academy, French Academy traditions and the Grand Tour, but less usually as part of the pedagogic programme examined in this exhibition. The close attention to this particular theme enables interesting connections between work covering four centuries, which might otherwise seem too broad a period to encompass. Classical sculpture, reappearing in drawings and prints, from different angles and through different eyes, forms its own communion with the passage of time. From its sixteenth-century rediscovery to its status as ideal form, and ultimately to its relegation into art school basements, it afforded food for thought to early modern period and eighteenth-century students alike.

The superb catalogue which accompanies the exhibition offers detailed discussions of each item, following two lucid and thorough essays by Ian Jenkins and Adriano Aymonino which outline the themes and historical developments covered in the two rooms at the Soane.  A wealth of additional pictorial references expand the scholarly background, and abundant footnotes point us to current research as well as to seminal works, such as that of Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny in 1981 (Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500-1900; Yale University Press). Only a couple of the featured paintings have not travelled from Haarlem to the Soane, and the catalogue numbering differs from the rearrangement in the new space.

The opening image of the display is a print of The Academy of Baccio Bandinelli in Rome, (Agostino dei Musi, after Baccio Bandinelli, 1531). It is the first recorded print of artists copying from antique statuettes, and the first to include the term ‘accademia’ specifically to describe artistic training. Students are gathered round a table where a single candle throws light  on them and the statuettes alike. The shadows of figures on a shelf at the back create exaggerated human gestures on  the wall, while jars and pots form less complex or dynamic shapes as still lifes on the right. The representation of human emotion and the repertoire of postures found in recently excavated antique sculptures would influence the course of artistic expression for centuries, and lead to a particular shaping of the human form. Bandinelli was a shamelessly self-promoting artist who was given the use of the Belvedere in Rome for his ‘Academy’. An anonymous print of his Self-Portrait, Seated (1548) includes an extraordinary array of small-scale figures derived from Hercules, Cnidian Venus and Belvedere Torso types which seem to tumble around the seated artist. They are depicted from different angles, which curiously animates them in the way that a series of Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) stop-motion photograph stills would beguile the eye over three hundred years later.

Manifestations of the torso are ubiquitous in art throughout the period examined in the exhibition. Bandinelli is almost predicting its influence; the twisted and tortured fragment adapted in paintings of both triumphant and defeated heroic action. In the final case, Joseph Mallord William Turner’s 1792 Study of a Plaster Cast of The Belvedere Torso is displayed. It is thought to be a presentation drawing which had to be accepted in order to progress to the Life Academy in the Royal Academy schools. It is a delicate and powerful image, a single poignant damaged body (without the fig leaf seen in the Vatican Museum photograph which was unaccountably chosen as an illustration in the catalogue’s essay by Adriano Aymonino, p.26). The catalogue poses the question, ‘Might it be that Turner was attempting to turn marble into flesh, the practice prescribed by Rubens […]?’ (p.201-2). The original was fortuitously on show this year at the British Museum (in Defining Beauty: The Body in Ancient Greek Art), though few seemed to take the opportunity to draw it there.

Most of the images of studios in this exhibition include stone or plaster cast limbs, heads and other body fragments hanging on walls or ranged along shelves. They remind us of the accurate observation and detached analysis necessary for the artist to progress, of the separate parts which combine to construct the ideal human form as expressed in the statues of antiquity. They also foreshadow the study of the living model, which was the final stage of artistic training, along with anatomical studies, using prepared écorché figures and anatomical specimens.

Consideration of the statue from all angles was part of artistic training, and we encounter students gazing up at the figure (Hendrick Goltzius, The Farnese Hercules, print, 1592), or into its eyes (William Pether, after Joseph Wright of Derby, An Academy, 1772), but also across the room or at their companions, intently at their paper or occasionally out at the viewer. In this exhibition the Farnese Hercules‘ muscular strength confronts us several times, foreshortened, reduced in size or in mirror-image prints. The acts of observing the figure, discussing, interpreting and rendering it in two dimensions or being distracted are all evident. Goltzius’ print mentioned above, and his similar companion print of the Apollo Belvedere (1592) incorporate the upper bodies of students at the bottom right, contemplating the statues. The catalogue suggests that ‘The resulting interaction between front and back, between seeing and imagining, gives the print an agreeable tension…’ (p.116). An odd association might also arise, that of the ‘donor’ figures which regularly featured in Netherlandish triptych panel paintings, usually in contemporary dress, in the right or left foreground and dwarfed by the Virgin and Child or saints which they honour. Goltzius’ students venerate the subjects in the prints in a different way, offering their artistic talent as tribute to the canon of pagan gods and heroes. The meditation on antiquity was a powerful trope across the arts, particularly within the period examined in this exhibition. It prompted thoughts on time and decay, man’s relationship with God, earthly power, justice and revenge for example. The picture of young boys studying and reproducing images of the ancient world prompts many potent associations between youth and age, truth and mimesis. On a more prosaic level, these pictures of academies promoted the skills of their masters, their renown as mentors and promoters of the highest forms of art, facilitating and connecting the next generation with the excellence of the past.

The concentration and endeavour necessary for success as an artist can be traced in the hunched young men balancing their drawing-boards in crowded classrooms, and in the one or two more poised female figures who appear in later images. An Allegory of Painting (attrib. to Jan Claudius de Cock, c.1706) includes a woman with a palette and brushes, gesturing to the Hercules figure which three boys are drawing. She is described as ‘a voluptuously dressed female figure’ in the catalogue, and as ‘a buxom woman’ on the exhibition label. Perhaps this does not adequately support our understanding of her as the emblem of painting itself, rather than as a somewhat coquettish student. She is a familiar eighteenth-century icon, in works by Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) and Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807) for example, but in reality the early Academy was exclusively male. The two examples in the exhibition of women drawing from antique statues for pleasure are shown demonstrating  their accomplishments and taste, dressed with inappropriate elegance (Gijsbertus Johannus Van den Berg, The Drawing Lesson, c.1790s), and, we assume, accepting gentle instruction rather than rigorous criticism (William Chambers, The Townley Marbles in the Dining Room of 7 Park Street, Westminster, 1795). Images of large groups of women studying in art academies are lacking in the exhibition and paintings depicting such a subject are mainly by nineteenth-century French artists (such as Adrienne Marie Louise Grandpierre-Deverzy, The Studio of Abel du Pujol, 1822, Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris). This absence reflects the particular scope of the loan collection, but also highlights the very late acceptance of drawing from the human figure for women as preparation for professional artistic status.

By the eighteenth century a particular appreciation seemed to have developed for the charms of the Venus de’ Medici from both front and back which Bandinelli had earlier depicted in his Self-Portrait (see for example Richard Cosway, Charles Townley with a Group of Connoisseurs,1771-5). She was first recorded in 1638 as becoming ‘the most admired embodiment of the graceful female body’ (see catalogue, p.41). As statues were unearthed, the canon of admired examples was extended. Along with the Hercules and Torso mentioned above, the Wrestlers, Niobe, the Spinario, Laocoön, and the Borghese Gladiator tested the abilities of art students into the nineteenth century. Plaster casts of full-sized or reduced copies jostled in academy rooms. Edward Francis Burney’s (1760-1848) 1779 watercolour of The Antique Academy at Old Somerset House is an exhibit which is fascinating to compare to the opulent room as it now appears in the Courtauld Gallery. The handful of yellowing casts which once remained on show to attest to its former use have now disappeared. The only colour in Burney’s drawing is in the students’ and teacher’s coats. Shelves and plinths house ranks of busts, limbs and figures, and boxes or stands support the drawing boards of the privileged, diligent few.

Possibly the largest exhibit on the walls is the Joseph Michael Gandy (1771-1843) View of the Dome Area by Lamplight looking South-East (1811). This brings us back to the Sir John Soane’s Museum, since it is an atmospheric impression of the interior of the museum itself. The method of drawing by candle or lamplight was not only a practical necessity but was seen as the best way to capture the essence of the antique figure.In his Italian Journey 1786-88, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had advocated the importance of viewing sculpture at night by candlelight or flares to enjoy the thrill of romantic imaginative affinity. Wright of Derby’s An Academy, mentioned above, depicts a student gazing longingly at the statue of the Nymph with the Shell, as if willing her to react. The room is very dark, the nymph and the students’ faces sharing the only light from a hidden lamp. The rise of Romanticism placed a new emphasis on the student’s imaginative response to the antiquities. Gandy includes the shadowy figure of Soane himself gesturing to his collection, willing us into awe and wonder.

The exhibition suggests that nineteenth-century art movements led to the decline of interest in antique models and the abandonment of copying as part of artistic training, but particularly points to the commercial availability of replicas to explain the growing indifference to the antique as the primary exemplar of the ideal form. A lingering consciousness and reinterpretation of the antique  by artists has remained throughout the twentieth century and into the current one, from Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) to Francis Bacon (1909-1992) or Mimmo Paladino (b.1948), whether they learnt through copying or not. The exhibition perhaps prompts us to examine artistic processes more closely, alongside the remains of the Antique world, which form a thread of connection throughout the four centuries represented in this exhibition and beyond.

Drawn from the Antique is at the Sir John Soane Museum from 25th June to 26th September 2015.

Image: W. Chambers, The Townley Collection in the Dining Room at Park Street, Westminster (London, 1794-5), used courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.