As I pointed out last week, one of the chief attractions of the Treasures from Budapest show at the Royal Academy is the inclusion of two rooms of Old Master drawings. For those of us who find large exhibitions overwhelming, there is a refreshingly modest display of French drawings (admission free) at the Wallace Collection, which makes a good companion to the RA’s blockbuster.
The earliest work is a fanciful, somehow ethereal, black-chalk and brown-wash 16th-century drawing of a water festival at Fontainebleau, by Antoine Caron. Much tougher is a neighbouring red-chalk study by Jacques Callot, ‘Ecce Homo’. Despite a certain vulgarity of pose and gesture, it has a brash energy that buttonholes the viewer in a way the Caron never could. A gentle little Claude landscape is rather eclipsed by one of the reasons for visiting this exhibition: Poussin’s brown-ink drawing next to it. This study for his great painting ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’, owned by the Wallace and the inspiration for Anthony Powell’s great novel-cycle, is far less of a linear design than might be expected.
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