Member-only story
Naked Truths About Life Drawing Classes
Experiences of drawing the human form
Not long ago I started attending life drawing classes at a local college.
Just as you see in films or on TV, the disrobed figure sits in the centre of a room with a circle of easels surrounding them. Behind the easels, students drag charcoal blocks or dab Indian ink or smudge oil pastels across the paper, and do their best to render a decent likeness of the posed model in front of them.
People I tell are intrigued by this scene.
They wonder about the model, how young or old they are, if they’re male or female, about the nudity and the potential for allure or disgust.
The drawings I bring home are invariably endowed with some intimate swell of nakedness, and when I present them to my partner, I see her initial thoughts puzzled by the idea of my eye lingering over these confidential details…
Centuries of tradition
The practice of sketching from live models has long been seen as an essential component of artistic education, dating back to at least the Renaissance period.
One of the most intriguing, examples comes from 19th-century Paris.
The Académie Suisse was a notable life-drawing school in the heart of the city, attractive to many artists for its affordable fees and informal, somewhat bohemian atmosphere.
Virtually every great artist of the time passed through its doors, from Édouard Manet to Paul Cézanne. It was where Claude Monet met Camille Pissarro long before the term “Impressionism” was coined.
The drawing school enabled students to draw or paint directly from a nude model. For three weeks of the month, the artists were provided with a male model to work from, and for one week a female model.
An evocative description of the Académie Suisse comes from the English artist Valentine C. Prinsep, who studied there during the 1850s. In his essay “A Student’s Life in Paris in 1859”, Prinsep recounts how on the evening of his first class…
