Works on Paper 2019 - Jean Luc Baroni

Simon Vouet
Paris 1590 – 1649
8
Head of an Old Bearded Man
Black chalk, heightened with white on buff paper
200 x 145 mm (7 7 /8 x 5 3 /4 in.)
Called back to France in 1627 after a fourteen-year
stay in Rome, Simon Vouet returned to the capital
with a style imbued with Italian culture, in which the
understanding of the human figure rests on drawing
after nature as the essential tool for all pictorial
work. The importance he gives to drawing explains
in large part Vouet’s success in Paris with the artists
of the following generation who profited from their
apprenticeship in the workshops he occupied at the
Louvre.
The important commissions that Vouet had received
in Italy (decorations of chapels, altarpieces), his
recourse to assistants 1 , the fact that an artist such
as Claude Mellan, who moved to the Eternal City
in 1624, sought drawing lessons from him 2 , and
the fundamental place that drawing occupied
in the genesis of his Parisian oeuvre, are all facts
that suggests that the artist had already placed the
drawing at the heart of his work long before he was
summoned back to Paris by the king. While Vouet
rapidly sketched his compositions in black or red
chalk, and wash, he prepared the figures in his
paintings with detailed studies executed in black
chalk and light touches of white chalk, as can be
seen in the present drawing.
This study is not related to any figure in Vouet’s
paintings but bears similarities with his works of
the Italian period and those executed shortly after
his return to Paris. A testimony of the naturalistic
inclination in Vouet’s art, The present study of the
head of an old man recalls that of the figure of
Saint Jerome in the painting of Saint Jerome and
the Angel (Washington, National Gallery of Art),
or, for example, the figures in The Investiture of
Saint Francis (Rome, the church of an Lorenzo in
Lucina), as well as the apostles in the Last Supper
(Loreto, Museo Apostolico). In both the Head of
Saint Jerome and the present study, Vouet focuses
on drawing the wrinkles on the forehead and the
folds under the eyebrows, and models the cheeks
with light. Dating this drawing with any precision
is difficult because on the one hand, the artist’s
corpus of drawings from the Italian period is very
limited 3 and, on the other hand, because the artist
used similar figure types in his paintings at intervals
of several years. Nevertheless, the freedom of
execution of the hair and beard is found in other
drawings which date from the early 1630s, such as,
for example, the Head of an Old Bearded Man in
profile to the right (Paris, Musée du Louvre 4 ), which
suggests that the present sheet might have been
executed during the same years.
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