Visual Arts: Lorrain unplugged
DRAWINGS BRITISH MUSEUM LONDON
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Your support makes all the difference.IN A hushed, library-like space, the British Museum's Room 90, there is the biggest show of drawings and prints by Claude Lorrain since 1927. These pictures were the passion of a handful of English connoisseurs for a century after about 1720. They are cheek by jowl with Mantegna to Rubens, drawings from the Weld-Blundell collection, which was mostly brought together late in the 18th century by William Roscoe, a Liverpool lawyer and banker.
At first sight, there is something bibliophilic about loving drawings, and some of these do seem to be of academic interest only. But don't be deceived. Many of these drawings are exciting because they give us a glimpse behind the formality of classical painting. Drawings are like the "unplugged" versions of rock songs: bare and sinewy. A Claude sketch is strikingly vigorous as compared with the etching for which it was a preparation. But drawings were not always preparatory: some were an artist's record of a painting before it was sent off to a customer.
Drawings are timeless. Nothing else can make us feel so strongly that the sensibility of the human eye, brain and hand has hardly changed throughout the centuries. A student of Rembrandt's, for instance, sketches in a greedy landlord in The Good Samaritan paying the innkeeper just as the great British illustrator Edward Ardizzone might have. Guercino draws a plump Bathsheba or a sensuous St Sebastian with all the sexy insouciance of a Picasso or a Hockney.
Our taste for spontaneity is probably more attuned to the private aspirations of 17th-century artists than was the aesthetic of their patrons. It is easy to imagine that the highly impressionist style of some of Claude's drawings was deliberate, an effect in itself, and not merely a shorthand.
Our modern pleasure in accurate depictions of nature also helps us respond to Claude's landscape drawings, in which trees, say, are far more realistic than the highly poeticised versions for which his paintings were adored at the time. In all these less finished works, we stand beside great technicians when they are at their least artful.
`Claude Lorrain: Drawings from the British and Ashmolean Museums'; `Mantegna to Rubens: Drawings from Liverpool's Weld-Blundell Collection'. Both in Room 90, British Museum, Great Russell Street, London WC1, until 10 January (0171-636 1555)
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