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Drawing on experience

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 5th December 2007

Theatres of Life: Drawings from the Rothschild Collection, The Wallace Collection, Manchester Square, London W1, until 27 January 2008
Pop Art Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, until 20 January 2008, Sponsored by Lehman Brothers

The exhibition consists of two rooms (the catalogue, published by Paul Holberton at £25 in paperback, is far grander than the show), of which the second room is the more interesting. The first contains a lot of drawings of theatricals and entertainments, the forerunners of fashion plates, along with a superb Wilkie of a Pierrot in brown ink and a typically ornate Bakst costume design. Sadly, these two works are hung far too high for ease of contemplation. The only other drawing in this room to hold my eye was the unusual ‘Design for a stage set with garden vista leading to a chateau’ in red chalk, depicting serried ranks of arboured loggias. Better to move through and linger in the second room.

Here an ink-and-wash drawing by that master of sentiment Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805) shows the strength of his vision beneath the trappings of symbolic moralising that usually obscure it. The energetic brown ink line zips through the masses of grey wash, passionately articulating the subject of an old man reproaching a youth. Nearby are Gabriel de Saint-Aubin’s fizzy, fluttery chalk drawing of ‘Figures Dancing’, and a strange Boucher ‘Flagellation’, an untypical subject for this painter of sensual delights. There are good things by Lancret, especially a red chalk drawing of a swing (a very 18th-century subject), and a charming Fragonard, a fluid and masterly wash drawing of an assignation at a window. For full-bodied colour, turn to Delacroix’s ‘Two Suliote soldiers by the sea’, while of the several architectural studies on display, note especially Charles De Wailly’s ‘Design for a Grand Salon lined with Mirrors’.

A very different use of brown ink and grey wash from Greuze’s may be studied in one of the few Dutch drawings in the show. ‘Garden Scene’ by Dirk Maas, from the 1690s, depicts a Mediterranean-style view, a stately garden with appropriate architecture, which may have originated as a tapestry design. It is altogether more consciously elegant in handling, vertical and airy in its principal emphases, rather than low and clustered like Greuze’s drawing. Its effect is less definite, less emotional, atmospheric in a vague way and immensely refined. The exhibition will tour to the Djanogly Gallery in Nottingham (12 April to 1 June 2008). Although interesting to see how it looks there, perhaps a visit to Waddesdon itself is more in order.