Drawings and Sketchbooks

Frédéric Bazille’s drawings bring us close to the decisions behind his paintings. An academic male nude dated 27 March 1863 records the young artist’s training; studies for Family Reunion, The Pink Dress and Summer Scene show him testing figures against their surroundings. Other sheets have their own presence, particularly the charcoal portrait of Manet at his easel. The album study for Ruth and Boaz belongs to another kind of ambition: the construction of a large biblical scene. Together, these works reveal a painter who used paper to practise, observe, experiment and reconsider. ^{[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]}

Looking at the drawings beside the paintings changes the pace at which we see Bazille. A finished canvas can make a complicated arrangement appear inevitable. A study restores alternatives: a figure turned differently, a group reduced or expanded, an object tried and then omitted. Paper also preserves a less formal range of activity, including caricatures, notes and inscriptions. These deserve attention alongside the major compositional sheets, without assuming that every mark was the beginning of a painting.

Learning to draw the figure

The Academy of a Man in Montpellier’s Musée Fabre is an especially useful starting point because its inscription supplies an exact date. The sheet, catalogued as MSb-95, is dated 27 March 1863 and uses black pencil, charcoal and stumping on laid paper. The inscription gives an unusually precise point of reference for his early drawing. Its substantial size, about sixty centimetres high, also distinguishes it from a casual notebook sketch. This is sustained work from a posed body. ^[1]

Schulman places the drawing within Bazille’s early training with Charles Gleyre and discusses the changes still visible in the position of a leg. His assessment draws attention both to the developing modelling of the body and to awkwardness in the hands and limbs. The value of the sheet lies partly in that combination: control is being acquired through correction. It is more revealing to see a student working through a pose than to demand that an early exercise already display the painter of the late outdoor compositions. ^[1]

Figure practice remained useful after the first period of training. In a letter to his father dated 6 January 1865, Bazille explained his winter programme: “I must paint a great many figures this winter” — a new translation from the French. He immediately connected that work with making better use of the coming spring and summer in the countryside. He was describing painting from the living model. The letter explains why the study of bodies and outdoor painting belonged together in his thinking. ^[10]

Albums, loose sheets and the problem of counting

Bazille’s works on paper survive in several forms. There are separate studies, drawings on both sides of a sheet, and pages containing more than one subject. Two important albums bear the inventory numbers RF 5259 and RF 5260. Their contents include recognisable preparations for paintings as well as heads, figures, caricatures and written material. A catalogue entry may describe a whole arrangement, a particular side of a leaf or several studies sharing that side. It should not automatically be counted as one separate physical work. ^[7]

This matters when encountering totals for Bazille’s output. Schulman’s three online indexes list 284 records: 85 painting records, 40 separate works-on-paper records and 159 album or study records. These figures describe the catalogue’s organisation. They are not a census of 284 independent objects, still less a guarantee that every attribution is uncontested. For the drawings, an inventory number and a recto or verso designation often tell us more than a grand total. “Recto” identifies the front of a leaf and “verso” its reverse. ^[7]

The albums also widen the picture of Bazille’s interests. RF 5260 includes a charcoal page catalogued as a caricature of the Venus de Milo with other caricatures; the opening material of RF 5259 includes caricatures and notes concerning opera. These uses of drawing differ from the careful organisation of a Salon composition. They suggest the ease with which graphic play, cultural interests and practical work could occupy the same books. The titles identify their subjects; they do not establish an exact occasion for every sketch. ^[11]

Written pages need equal care. The entry called Inscriptions, MSb-269, includes the words Nina la Belle and calculations, while MSb-277 records further inscriptions. Such material preserves the ordinary mixed life of a working album. A phrase or calculation is evidence of something written, not proof of an otherwise unknown completed picture. ^[12]

Building Family Reunion

The studies for Family Reunion show how drawing could bring people, garden furniture and a particular place into one composition. RF 5258 is the rougher nine-figure arrangement. RF 5257 recto develops the terrace setting more fully, including the tree and a dog. Schulman proposes that the more summary drawing came first. That is a reasonable reading of their relative development, although their appearance alone does not supply an exact sequence of sittings or dates. ^{[13] [14]}

In the more developed sheet, the group has become an arrangement within a place rather than a collection of isolated portrait ideas. Hatching and reinforced contours give different weights to people and surroundings. The near-square paper also invites comparison with the broad final canvas: a composition could be enlarged sideways and redistributed as it moved into paint. The drawing is useful precisely because it does not reproduce every feature of the finished picture. The dog, for example, was not retained, and its personal name need not be settled to understand its compositional role. ^[14]

The museum records RF 5257 recto as an undated sheet measuring 30.1 by 30 centimetres, acquired through André Joubin’s gift in 1921. The absence of a written date on this particular study should be distinguished from the dated academy. Nor did drawing settle every later decision. Bruno Mottin’s technical study identifies changes made in the painting itself, including the addition of Bazille’s self-portrait. Preparation continued on the canvas. ^{[2] [15]}

Other album groups are less securely attached to the picture. For MSb-222 and MSb-261, Schulman argues for a connection with Family Reunion, while discussing associations with the terrace at Méric. Repeated furniture and a familiar setting make comparison useful, but they do not make every garden gathering an unquestionable preparatory stage. The uncertainty helps distinguish a shared store of motifs from a fully identified plan. ^[16]

A grid that leaves room for change

The black-pencil study for The Pink Dress, RF 29730 recto, is squared for transfer. The Louvre identifies its sitter as Thérèse des Hours, seated on a terrace, and gives the sheet’s dimensions as 47.5 by 30.5 centimetres. The grid makes proportion and placement easier to compare across surfaces. It is a practical aid, allowing a figure and the distant architecture to be considered within the same framework. ^[3]

Yet a squared drawing is not a promise to preserve everything. The preparatory figure differs from the painted one in her dress, arms and pose. Mottin’s examination of the canvas shows substantial reworking after the picture was begun in 1864, with changes extending beyond the first drawing’s arrangement. Infrared examination detected pencil work in the village and trees; it did not reveal a transferred grid on the canvas. The surviving evidence therefore supports careful planning followed by further invention, rather than mechanical enlargement. ^[15]

This distinction is central to Bazille’s style and technique. A drawing can establish relationships without fixing the final surface, colour or direction of a face. In The Pink Dress, decisions about the sitter also affect how we enter the landscape beyond her. Studying the sheet alongside the canvas makes that relationship easier to see.

Summer Scene: composing bodies in a landscape

RF 29731 recto, the study for Summer Scene, combines brown pen-and-ink work with charcoal on cream paper. The Louvre’s record explicitly connects it with the painting exhibited at the Salon of 1870 and with further studies in album RF 5259. It is one part of a group of preparations. ^[4]

There are seven figures in this compositional study, compared with eight in the painting. The general gathering of swimmers, resting figures and wrestlers is recognisable, but individual actions and positions change. Drawing allowed Bazille to consider the intervals between bodies as well as the bodies themselves: how a standing figure interrupts a bank, how a reclining one lies across it, and how paired activity differs from solitary rest. The change in figure count is a particularly clear reminder that an overall composition could remain open to revision. ^[17]

Album pages MSb-242, MSb-245 and MSb-246 pursue related arrangements and wrestling poses. Their differences reveal experiments whose exact order remains uncertain. Some studies concentrate on the figure group, others on alternative bodily positions. Taken together, they support an account of the picture as something assembled through repeated consideration. They cannot tell us the exact day on which every figure entered the design. ^[18]

The reverse of RF 29731 adds another caution. Its current Musée d’Orsay title is Portrait of a Bearded Man. It has sometimes been discussed as a self-portrait, but the museum’s broader identification should be respected: the drawing cannot securely be used as a likeness of Bazille. Two sides of a sheet can preserve different subjects without sharing the same degree of certainty about whom or what they represent. ^[19]

Manet at his easel

Manet and his Easel, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, rewards looking as a drawing in its own right. A tall hat, projecting beard and dark coat give the profile a compact, immediately legible shape. Manet faces left towards the steep diagonal of the easel. His extended forearm crosses the gap between them, while the hand closer to his waist interrupts the larger dark mass of his clothing. Beneath his feet, broad diagonal charcoal marks establish a shadow with very little description of the room.

The economy is striking. The easel is made from a few firm lines; the coat is built from a broad dark area, renewed outlines and shorter strokes. White accents pick out the hand and sleeve. Much of the paper remains open, so that the act of working is concentrated in the small space between face, hand and easel. The drawing does not need a detailed studio interior to make the relationship convincing.

The Met dates the sheet 1868–70 with a question mark and describes its materials as charcoal and white chalk on blue laid paper now faded to yellow-grey. Its present colour is therefore part of its material history, rather than a reliable guide to the original contrast. The museum suggests Bazille’s rue La Condamine studio as the probable setting and frames the portrait through the friendship between the two artists. The suggested studio setting remains uncertain, as does the date. ^[5]

The comparison with Bazille’s Studio, Rue La Condamine is useful: here the encounter is compressed into one working figure. No large gathering or catalogue of wall pictures is required. Drawing makes room for a more concentrated observation.

Gardens, ramparts and working figures

Drawing accompanied Bazille beyond the studio. From Aigues-Mortes in late May 1867 he asked his family for very black Conté pencils encased in wood. The same letter describes weather restricting his outings and several landscapes already begun. The request places drawing materials within the practical business of travel and work, without proving where a particular surviving sheet was made. ^[20]

Album RF 5259 contains studies catalogued for the ramparts at Aigues-Mortes, as well as ink studies of horses connected with the Porte de la Reine. The distinction is revealing. Architectural masses and the small living figures around them posed separate problems. A rider or horse could require its own consideration even when it occupied only a fraction of a landscape painting. Those titles establish associations, without demonstrating a precise order of execution. ^[21]

At Méric, the drawings for The Little Gardener likewise separate a figure’s appearance from its eventual role in the larger scene. MSb-233 and MSb-266 differ from the painting in details of clothing, pose and arrangement. In her Houston museum essay, Helga Kessler Aurisch discusses the changing distribution of figures within the garden project. These differences reveal compositional choices, while leaving the gardener’s identity unresolved. Changed clothing does not by itself establish that a different person posed. ^[22]

The study catalogued as MSb-264 gives the fisherman a prominent place in the design for Fisherman with a Net. Schulman identifies no other known study for that painting. This describes what has survived or been recognised, rather than proving that Bazille needed only one drawing. Conversely, the squared album study for La Toilette contains adjustments and subsidiary figure ideas. Planning could take the form of one substantial arrangement, multiple small trials, or both on a single page. ^{[23] [24]}

Ruth and Boaz: drawing an ambitious late composition

The study for Ruth and Boaz, RF 5259,65, is located on folio 50 verso of the album. The Louvre records charcoal and pastel and dates it approximately 1869–70. It also distinguishes the drawn leaf, 24.1 by 34.6 centimetres, from the slightly larger album. Those details locate the composition in a physical book rather than treating its reproduced image as an isolated rectangle. ^[6]

Schulman points out a tripod and a sickle in the study that do not appear in the painting. They are small but useful evidence of selection. A developed design could lose objects as Bazille clarified the relationship between the reclining figures and their surroundings. The catalogue also connects the composition with separate studies of Ruth and the sleeping Boaz. Drawing addressed both the whole scene and particular bodies within it. ^[25]

The unfinished painting should not make those preparations seem unsuccessful. They record a sustained project whose final state remains open. The biblical and literary subject coexisted with Bazille’s modern portraits and outdoor figures; it was another problem he chose to explore. Technical examination also establishes that Ruth and Boaz was painted on a reused canvas bearing an earlier piano composition. Paper studies and the physical history of the canvas disclose different aspects of its making. ^{[26] [15]}

Colour on paper and the single known etching

Bazille’s paper work extends beyond monochrome drawing. The Fitzwilliam Museum’s Black Woman with Peonies, about 1870, combines watercolour and gouache with black chalk and graphite on card. It is a separate object from the two oil paintings of women with peonies in Montpellier and Washington. Medium matters here: the opaque colour of gouache belongs to the appearance of this particular work, and the shared subject does not make it interchangeable with either canvas. ^[9]

There is also an etching associated with View of the Village, dated 1868 and held by the Musée Fabre. It is Bazille’s only known etching. Schulman reports Michel Hilaire’s account of a posthumous printing of about fifty impressions. That later printing must be distinguished from Bazille’s making of the plate. The circumstances in which he learned the technique remain unclear; the surviving print cannot support a detailed story of his training as an etcher. ^[8]

Where the drawings survive

The collection names attached to these works require a little explanation. Several belong to the Musée d’Orsay’s drawings collection while being kept in the Louvre’s Department of Graphic Arts. The Louvre records for The Pink Dress, Summer Scene and Ruth and Boaz therefore describe Orsay works. This shared institutional history explains why the same study can appear under either museum’s name. The inventory number provides a reliable way to follow it. ^{[3] [4] [6]}

Gifts helped establish that public record. The developed Family Reunion sheet entered through Joubin in 1921, the album containing the Ruth study was also given in 1921, and the separate Pink Dress and Summer Scene studies were acquired as gifts in 1948. The Manet portrait followed another collecting path into the Met’s Robert Lehman Collection in 1975. These different histories brought together works whose original purposes ranged from private observation to preparation for exhibition paintings. ^{[2] [6] [3] [4] [5]}

The range of these objects is the reason to approach Bazille’s drawings individually. A dated academy, an album caricature, a squared composition, a portrait in charcoal and a coloured work on card answer different needs. Together they make his achievement less dependent on the idea of effortless spontaneity. They show observation becoming arrangement, and arrangement remaining open to change.