50 artistMarch 2020 http://www.painters-online.co.uk
Adele Wagsta
trained at Newcastle University and the
Slade School of Fine Art. She has taught in
Belgium, Germany, Italy and the UK. Adele
has been shortlisted for the Jerwood
Drawing Prize and the BP Portrait Award,
and her work has been exhibited in the
National Portrait Gallery, ING Discerning
Eye, Royal West of England Academy and
the Royal Society of Portrait Painters.
Adele has published two books. For more
details, see http://www.adelewagsta .co.ukT
his month’s drawings are
inspired by both large-scale,
complex figure compositions
that bustle with a feeling of
movement, to paintings that suggest
movement more quietly through the
use of line and shape.
The exhibition Young Bomberg and
the Old Masters at the National GalleryRhythm and
movement
Adele Wagsta concludes her series with a look at
how artists have explored and can learn about the
depiction of movement and rhythm found in Old
Master paintings
DRAWING FROM THE MASTERS: 3RD OF 3
(until March 1) shows how British
painter David Bomberg (1890–1957)
devoted his early studies to the Old
Masters by intensively copying his
favourite paintings. Portrait of a Young
Man (c1480–85) by Botticelli is said to
be one of which he made a number of
copies.
As a teenager, Bomberg drewintensively from Old Master works
in London collections, including the
National Gallery, although many of
these were destroyed once he was able
to formulate his own individual and
distinctive vision in painting. Bomberg
was one of a precociously talented
group of painters who studied together
at the Slade School of Fine Art, working
alongside students Stanley Spencer,
Paul Nash and Dora Carrington.The gure in movement
When thinking of the moving figure
in painting, scenes of many Last
Judgement interpretations come to
mind. We see vast groups of figures
both twisting and turning, the damned
falling to the depths of hell below or
the righteous being raised up to the
heavens. Figures that are dramatically
foreshortened, with contorted rhythms
of arms and legs crossing in space
to create lines that lead the eye
around the drama and action of each
composition. A sense of movement is
created as tightly packed figures move
upwards on the left-hand side, whereas
the damned fall and are being pulled
downwards.
Two contrasting approaches to details
from the Last Judgement were explored
in two very different drawings, a rapid
rhythmic sketch made after Rubens’
monumental painting (above right) and
a more sustained drawing of a figure
from Rogier Van der Weyden’s beautiful
Last Judgement scene (above far right).
Rogier Van Der Weyden’s complex Last
Judgement, also known as the Beaune
Altarpiece, is one of the masterpieces
of Flemish painting and the Northern
Renaissance. This polyptych altarpiece
in the Hôtel-Dieu Museum, Beaune
is the largest of the Flemish master’s Eugène Delacroix gure studies after Rubens’ Fall of the Rebel Angels c1820–22, graphite,
8¼ 12¼in (21 31.5cm).
Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art; image in public domain.
This sheet of gure studies captures the movement and energy of a number of individual gures
picked out from Rubens’ incredibly complex composition. Delacroix actually drew his gures
from a print, reproduced from the painting. Delacroix picked out small groups of gures from
the mass of contorted and tortured souls; he used short, owing lines to describe the shapes,
structures and musculature of the selected gures. Weight and tone are achieved by cross-
hatching while lines are used internally to pick out the musculature and form of the bodies