Academic Study of an Adolescent Boy by Vernet in the Princeton University Art Museum, April 2017

Horace Vernet, French, 1789–1863

Academic Study of Adolescent Boy, Seen from Behind, ca. 1807–10

Oil on canvas

100.5 x 81 cm (39 9/16 x 31 7/8 in.) frame: 120 × 100.3 × 7.5 cm (47 1/4 × 39 1/2 × 2 15/16 in.)

Museum purchase, John Maclean Magie, Class of 1892, and Gertrude Magie Fund

y1981-5

Provenance
Heim, London (by 1978–81; sold to Princeton University Art Museum).
Signatures and Inscriptions

Signed, upper right: H. Vernet

Gallery Label

This painting reflects the academic training required of students at the École des Beaux-Arts in nineteenth-century Paris. First, they learned to draw using prints and other drawings as their guides, then they graduated to drawing after sculpture (often using ancient works or plaster casts of them as models), and finally they drew or painted from live models. The model for this life study has been posed to recall sculptures of the god Apollo, who in antiquity was often given a youthful, even androgynous, form. Vernet’s image is hardly idealized or historicizing, however. The artist shows the model’s dirty fingernails and includes the crude props—stacked boxes and an old, frayed pillow—used to help the young man hold his classical stance.

Text from: artmuseum.princeton.edu/collections/objects/32581