Friday Art, Part 2 - The Nude Work of Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret

A couple of weeks ago I posted some work by Gustave Courtois, the lover and business partner of Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret.  Now it's Pascal's turn, and we start with this excellent work.

"Side pose, full crop" was the description that came with this Bouveret drawing.

Bouveret's use of the light in this painting is exceptional.  Interestingly, this model 

appears in a number of contemporaneous  paintings and academic drawings 

by quite a few different artists.  Not hard to see why he was popular.

This undated Bouveret drawing was labeled only "Back Study."

My source described this Bouveret painting as a study rather than an academic work, 

and some research on my part bore that out.  Bouveret was out of art school 

and had already exhibited at the Salon by the time he painted this in 1877.  

I'd really like to see the finished work, even if it is clothed.

France Day, Part 2 - Courtois of Courtois and Bouveret

Gustave Courtois (left) and Pascal Dagnan Bouveret met in a Paris art academy and became successful artists of the Academic style.  They also maintained a studio together for many 

years and were widely assumed by the sophisticated Parisians to have been lovers.  In the last 

months of my old tumblr blog, I featured a series of nudes by Bouveret.  Now it is Courtois' turn, 

but unfortunately he only did seminude paintings of men.  They are still worth a look.

(For those of you who missed the Bouveret nudes, I will rerun them fairly soon.)

As you will see in the following posts of this series, Courtois was not known for doing full nudes.  He did, however, produce a number of works that can only be described as homoerotic.  This one is a study of a middle aged man that somehow manages to get into that latter category in my opinion.

Courtois' work frequently featured Christian saints or figures from Classical mythology.  This is a study for a work the completed version of which I could not find despite several searches.

Courtois and Bouveret's friend and fellow artist Karl Ernst von Stetten may have been the model 

for Oedipus Killing His Father.  Stetten posed for Courtois on several occasions.

Several observers believe that the beefy model for Courtois' Paradise Lost was 1900's era strong 

man Maurice Deriaz, who has been featured here on the blog.  Deriaz is documented to have posed for several Courtois paintings, but this one is not officially ascribed to his modeling.

The Corn Sorter is by far the least erotic of today's Courtois paintings,]

but it shows an easy familiarity with a handsome male body.