drawing

/draw"ing/, n.

1. the act of a person or thing that draws.

2. a graphic representation by lines of an object or idea, as with a pencil; a delineation of form without reference to color.

3. a sketch, plan, or design, esp. one made with pen, pencil, or crayon.

4. the art or technique of making these.

5. something decided by drawing lots; lottery.

6. the selection, or time of selection, of the winning chance or chances sold by lottery or raffle.

[1275-1325; ME; see DRAW, -ING¹]

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I

Art or technique of producing images on a surface, usually paper, by means of marks in graphite, ink, chalk, charcoal, or crayon.

It is often a preliminary stage to work in other media. According to Giorgio Vasari, disegno (drawing and design) was the foundation of the three arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture. Beginning in the Italian Renaissance, debate arose regarding the role of drawing, as some saw it as an independent art form and others saw it as a preliminary stage in creating a painting or sculpture. By the 17th century, drawings had definite market value; connoisseurs specialized in collecting them, and forgers began to exploit the demand. In the 20th century, the drawing became fully autonomous as an art form, figuring significantly among the works of virtually every major artist, and the line itself was exploited both for its representational and its purely expressive qualities.

II

or drafting

In yarn manufacture, process of attenuating a loose assemblage of fibres.

These fibres, called sliver, pass through a series of rollers, which straighten the individual fibres and make them more parallel. Each pair of rollers spins faster than the previous one. Drawing reduces a soft mass of fibres to a firm uniform strand of usable size. For synthetic fibres, drawing is a stretching process applied to fibres in the plastic state, increasing orientation and reducing size. In metalworking, drawing refers to the process of shaping sheet metal into complex, three-dimensional forms with metal dies. See also carding, wire drawing.

III

(as used in expressions)

drawing frame

pen drawing

pencil drawing

wire drawing

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▪ art

Introduction

      the art or technique of producing images on a surface, usually paper, by means of marks, usually of ink, graphite, chalk, charcoal, or crayon.

      Drawing as formal artistic creation might be defined as the primarily linear rendition of objects in the visible world, as well as of concepts, thoughts, attitudes, emotions, and fantasies given visual form, of symbols and even of abstract forms. This definition, however, applies to all graphic arts and techniques that are characterized by an emphasis on form or shape rather than mass and colour, as in painting. Drawing as such differs from graphic printing processes in that a direct relationship exists between production and result. Drawing, in short, is the end product of a successive effort applied directly to the carrier. Whereas a drawing may form the basis for reproduction or copying, it is nonetheless unique by its very nature.

      Although not every artwork has been preceded by a drawing in the form of a preliminary sketch, drawing is in effect the basis of all visual arts. Often the drawing is absorbed by the completed work or destroyed in the course of completion. Thus, the usefulness of a ground plan drawing of a building that is to be erected decreases as the building goes up. Similarly, points and lines marked on a raw stone block represent auxiliary drawings for the sculpture that will be hewn out of the material. Essentially, every painting is built up of lines and pre-sketched in its main contours; only as the work proceeds is it consolidated into coloured surfaces. As shown by an increasing number of findings and investigations, drawings form the material basis of mural, panel, and book paintings. Such preliminary sketches may merely indicate the main contours or may predetermine the final execution down to exact details. They may also be mere probing sketches. Long before the appearance of actual small-scale drawing, this procedure was much used for monumental murals. With sinopia—the preliminary sketch found on a layer of its own on the wall underneath the fresco, or painting on freshly spread, moist plaster—one reaches the point at which a work that merely served as technical preparation becomes a formal drawing expressing an artistic intention.

      Not until the late 14th century, however, did drawing come into its own—no longer necessarily subordinate, conceptually or materially, to another art form. Autonomous, or independent, drawings, as the name implies, are themselves the ultimate aim of an artistic effort; therefore, they are usually characterized by a pictorial structure and by precise execution down to details.

      Formally, drawing offers the widest possible scope for the expression of artistic intentions. Bodies, space, depth, substantiality, and even motion can be made visible through drawing. Furthermore, because of the immediacy of its statement, drawing expresses the draftsman's personality spontaneously in the flow of the line; it is, in fact, the most personal of all artistic statements. It is thus plausible that the esteem in which drawing was held should have developed parallel to the value placed on individual artistic talent. Ever since the Renaissance, drawing has gradually been losing its anonymous and utilitarian status in the eyes of artists and the public, and its documents have been increasingly valued and collected.

      This article deals with the aesthetic characteristics, the mediums of expression, the subject matter, and the history of drawing.

General considerations

Elements and principles of design

      The principal element of drawing is the line. Through practically the entire development of Western drawing, this figure, essentially abstract, not present in nature, and appearing only as a border setting of bodies, colours, or planes, has been the vehicle of a representational more or less illusionist rendition of objects. Only in very recent times has the line been conceived of as an autonomous element of form, independent of an object to be represented.

      Conscious and purposeful drawing represents a considerable mental achievement, for the ability to reduce the spatial objects in the world around one to lines drawn on a plane presupposes a great gift for abstraction. The identification of the motif of a drawing by the viewer is no less an achievement, although it is mastered by practically all human beings. The visual interpretation of a line as a representation of a given object is made possible through certain forms of that line that call forth associations. The angular meeting of two lines, for example, may be considered as representing the borders of a plane; the addition of a third line can suggest the idea of a cubic body. Vaulting lines stand for arches, convergent lines for depth.

      With the aid of this modest basic vocabulary, one can distill comprehensible images from a variety of linear phenomena. The simple outline sketch—Greek legend has it that the first “picture” originated from copying the shadows on the sand—represents one of the oldest and most popular possibilities of graphic rendition. After decisively characterizing the form of Egyptian drawing and the archaic art of Greece, the outline sketch became the chief vehicle of artistic communication in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Used in a variety of ways in the early Renaissance, it became dominant once again in Neoclassicism, as it is, for that matter, in the classicist period of a given artist's total work.

      The outline sketch is elaborated into the detailed drawing by means of the line, which differentiates between the plastic and the spatial values of the object. Borders of individual objects, changes in the spatial plane, and varying intensities of colour applied within an outline sketch all tend to enrich and clarify the relationship between the whole and its component parts.

      The free beginning, the disappearance, or the interruption of a line provides opportunities for gradually slurring an edge until it becomes a plane, for letting colour transitions fade away, for having the line vanish in the depth.

      The thickening or thinning of a line can also be used to indicate, spatially or by means of colour, a change in the object designated by that line. Even light-and-shadow values may be rendered by differences in stroke strength.

      While the chopping up of a line into several brief segments, and, even more, the drawing of individual lines running parallel in one direction, makes the outlined form appear less corporeal and firm, it reproduces the visual impact of the form in a more pictorial manner. Slight shifts in the flow of the line are intended to represent smooth curves and transitions; they also reinforce the effect of light striking a surface and thus give the corporeal appearance. Finally, short, curving segments of a line that do not stand in a clearly angular relationship to one another but are arranged on the sheet in loose formation allow the pictorial and colour component to dominate, as in the work of the 16th-century Italian artist Jacopo Tintoretto (Tintoretto). An extreme case is the complete dissolution of the linear stroke into dots and spots, as, for example, in the drawings of the 19th-century Pointillist painter Georges Seurat (Seurat, Georges).

      A mere combination of these varied shapes of the line, without reference to the mediums in which the lines are drawn, provides the artist with a plethora of subjective opportunities for the expression both of general stylistic traits and of personal characteristics. An arrangement of forceful, mainly straight strokes in accentuated, sharp angles lends the drawing an austere character emphasizing dramatic and expressive traits. This method of drawing, in fact, is characteristic of stylistic epochs and artistic regions (not to mention individual artists) that prefer these qualities: in the rather sober city of Florence, in German Expressionism, where it is used to convey mood, but also in the drawings of Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn) and Vincent van Gogh (Gogh, Vincent van). Soft lines, on the other hand, running in drawn-out, smoothly rounded forms and stressing graphic regularity above any statement of content, constitute the formal equivalent to elegant, courtly, and lyric qualities of expression. Accordingly, they are often found in drawings of the Soft style; in the early Renaissance, particularly in the work of artists from the Italian province of Umbria and in young Raphael's sketches; in the work of Nazarenes, a 19th-century group of Romantic painters whose subjects were mainly religious; in the Jugendstil, a late-19th- and early-20th-century German decorative style parallel to Art Nouveau in its organic foliate forms, sinuous lines, and non-geometric curves; and in a very pure form in one of the classic draftsmen, the 19th-century French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (Ingres, J.-A.-D). A markedly even-stroke texture, with waxing and waning strokes in regular proportions and evenly distributed within the page, brings drawing close to calligraphic writing and is found in all stylistic epochs that value ornamentation.

 The technique of hatching gives the line an additional potential for the clarification of plastic relationships and of light phenomena. In hatching, parallel, short, equidistant, more or less straight lines create static and tectonic (structural) values by marking individual body planes. Gently curved hatching stresses the roundness of the body and can also accentuate, as tone value, shaded parts of the representation.

      Cross-hatching, in which two layers of hatching intersect at right angles, reinforces the body-and-shadow effect. Known since the days of Michelangelo and Dürer (Dürer, Albrecht) in the 15th and 16th centuries, this artistic technique is often used with slanted or even curved hachures for the linear rendition of rounded parts. In rigorously monotone drawings, this method is the most suitable for the depiction of spherical bodies. The human body, with its highly articulated surface, can be modelled in this fashion very clearly and precisely. For 17th- and 18th-century engravers, this process became the most important means of drawing. All of these different possibilities of linear rendition can be achieved with pen and crayon as well as with the brush.

Plane techniques

      Linear techniques of drawing are supplemented by plane methods, which can also be carried out with crayon. For example, evenly applied dotting, which is better done with soft mediums, results in an areal effect in uniform tone. Various values of the chiaroscuro (pictorial representation in terms of light and shade without regard to colour) scale can also be rendered by means of dry or moist rubbing. Pulverized drawing materials that are rubbed into the drawing surface result in evenly toned areas that serve both as a closed foundation for linear drawing and as indication of colour values for individual sections.

      More significant for plane phenomena, however, is brushwork, which, to be sure, can adopt all linear drawing methods but the particular strength of which lies in stroke width and tone intensity, a medium that allows for extensive differentiation in colour tone and value. Emphases created by the repeated application of the same tone provide illusionistic indentations that can be conceived of spatially and corporeally. Colour differences result from the use of various mediums. Brushwork also lends itself to spatial and plastic representation, just as it can constitute an autonomous value in nonrepresentational drawings.

      All of these effects of monochrome drawing are accentuated with the use of varicoloured mediums of a basic material; for example, coloured chalks, drawing inks, or watercolour. While these mediums enrich the art of drawing, they do not widen its basic range.

The drawing surface

      To these graphic elements must be added another phenomenon the formal significance of which is restricted to drawing: the effect of the unmarked drawing surface, usually paper. Almost all studies (drawings of details), many autonomous sheets, most portrait drawings, as well as figure compositions, still lifes, and even landscapes stand free on the sheet instead of being closed off with a frame-line. Thus, the empty surface, suggesting by itself a spatial background to the drawing on it, contributes actively to the artistic effect.

      Even within line composition, the surface left blank fulfills an essential role. Among the details conveyed by the empty space may be the planes of a face, the smooth width of a garment, the mass of a figure or object, the substance the borders and nuances of which are indicated by the drawing. Even the space around individual objects, the spatial distance between them and their environment, the width of a river and the depth of a landscape may be merely signalled by the drawing and filled by the void.

      This void can itself become the dominant form enclosed by lines or contours—for example, in decorative sketches and in many ornamental drawings that make use of the negative form, an effect attainable also by tinting the blank planes.

Relationship between drawing and other art forms

      The bond between drawing and other art forms is of course very close, because the preliminary sketch was for a long time the chief purpose of the drawing. A state of mutual dependence exists in particular between painting and drawing, above all, in the case of sketches and studies for the composition of a picture. The relationship is closest with preliminary sketches of the same size as the original, the so-called cartoons whose contours were pressed through or perforated for dyeing with charcoal dust. Once transferred to the painting surface, the sketch had served its purpose.

      On autonomous sheets, too, the close connection between drawing and painting is evidenced by the stylistic features that are common to both. Drawing and painting agree in many details of content and form. Measurements; proportions of figures; relationship of figure to surrounding space; the distribution of the theme within the composition according to static order, symmetry, and equilibrium of the masses or according to dynamic contrasts, eccentric vanishing points, and overaccentuation of individual elements; rhythmic order in separate pictorial units in contrast to continuous flow of lines—all of these formal criteria apply to both art forms. The uniform stylistic character shared by drawing and painting is often less severely expressed in the former because of the spontaneous flow of the unfettered artist's stroke, or “handwriting,” and of the struggle for form as recorded in the pentimenti (indications in the drawing that the artist had changed his mind and drawn over his original formulation). Furthermore drawing can stimulate certain aspects of movement more easily than painting can through the rhythmic repetition of a contour or the blended rubbing of a sharp borderline.

      Still closer, perhaps, is the bond between drawing and engraving, which works with the same artistic means, with monochrome linearity as its main formal element and with various tone and plane methods closely related to those of drawing.

      Drawing is more independent than sculpture because sculpture uses a three-dimensional model. As a result, sculptors' drawings can always claim a greater degree of autonomy. (For the special position of the architectural sketch, see below Subject matter of drawing (drawing).)

Surfaces

 One can draw on practically anything that has a plane surface (it does not have to be level)—for example, papyrus and parchment, cloth, wood, metals, ceramics, stone, and even walls, glass, and sand. (With some of these, to be sure, another dimension is introduced through indentations that give the visual effect of lines.) Ever since the 15th century, however, paper has been by far the most popular ground.

      The technique of paper manufacturing, introduced from East Asia by the Arabs, has remained virtually unchanged for the past 2,000 years. A fibrous pulp of mulberry bark, hemp, bast, and linen rags is drained, pressed, and dried in flat molds. The introduction of wood pulp in the mid-19th century, which enabled manufacturers to satisfy the enormously increased demand for bulk paper, did not affect art paper because paper of large wood content yellows quickly and is therefore ill-suited for art drawing. The essential preparation of the paper to give it a smooth and even surface for writing or drawing was once done by rubbing it with bone meal, gypsum chalk, or zinc and titanium white in a very thin solution of glue and gum arabic. The proper priming, achieved through repeated rubbing and polishing, was of the utmost importance, especially for metalpoint drawings. If such preparation is too weak, the paper accepts the stroke badly; if it is too strong, the coating cracks and chips under the pressure of the hand. Since the early 15th century, however, the sheets have been given the desired smooth and nonabsorbent consistency by dipping them in a glue or alum bath. The addition of glue also made it possible to impart to the pulp paper a quality that permitted pen drawings. Pigments, too, could of course be added to the pulp, and the so-called natural papers—chiefly blue and called Venetian papers after the centre of the retail trade in this commodity—became more and more popular. While the 17th century liked half tints of blue, gray, brown, and green, the 18th preferred warm colours such as ivory and beige, along with blue. Since the 18th century, paper has been manufactured in all conceivable colours and half tones.

      The range of quality has also greatly increased since the end of the 18th century to give more painstakingly produced drawing papers. Even in earlier times, the absorbent Japan paper made of mulberry bark enjoyed great popularity. Handmade paper, stronger and free of wood, with an irregular edge, has remained to this day a favourite surface for drawings. Vellum, delicate and without veins, resembles parchment in its smooth surface. Modern watercolour paper is a pure linen paper glued in bulk and absolutely free of fat and alum; its two surfaces are of different grain. For pastel drawings, a firm, slightly rough surface is indicated, whereas pen drawings are best done on a very smooth paper.

      Granulated and softer drawing tools, such as charcoal, chalk, and graphite are not as dependent on a particular type of paper; but, because of their slight adhesiveness, they often require a stronger bond with the foundation as well as some form of surface protection. This process of fixing was formerly done through repeated varnishing with gum-arabic solution and even with glue or egg-white emulsion. Modern siccatives (drying substances) inhibit discoloration but cannot prevent the living surface from appearing sealed, as it were, under a skin. In pastels especially, the manifold prismatic effects of finely powdered coloured crayons are thus lost, and the bright and airy surface is turned into an amorphous, heavy layer. Pastels, which brush off easily, are therefore best preserved under glass.

Tools (tool) and techniques

      Such varied tools as slate pencils, charcoal, metal styli, and chalks may be used for drawing as well as all writing utensils, including pens, pencils, and brushes. Indeed, even chisels and diamonds are used for drawing, not to mention saws, drills, and fire. Dry drawing tools differ in effectiveness from liquid ones because it is not irrelevant from the artistic point of view whether one uses a self-drawing medium that permits an evenly flowing line dependent only on hand pressure or a transferring tool that must be put down periodically and refilled, with resultant differences in the strength and concentration of the line. Modern drawing mediums that combine both possibilities, such as fountain pens, ball-point pens, and fibre-tipped pens, are recent inventions.

      No less varied than the nature and composition of these drawing mediums is their aesthetic effect. It would nevertheless be wrong to systematize the art of drawing on the basis of the techniques applied; not only does almost every technique have several applications but it can also be combined with other techniques, and the draftsman's temperament inevitably plays a role as well. Even if certain techniques predominate in certain periods, the selection of drawing mediums depends on the intended effect and not vice versa. Artists have always been able to attain the desired effect with a variety of techniques. Dry mediums, for example, are predestined for clear lines, liquid ones for plane application. Yet extremely fine strokes can also be made by brush, and broad fields can be marked in with pencil or crayon. Some mediums, including charcoal, one of the oldest, if not the oldest of all, allow both extremes.

Charcoal (charcoal drawing)

      In every hearth or fireplace, partially consumed pieces of wood remain that can be used as a convenient tool for drawing. Evidence of charcoal sketches for mural, panel, and even miniature paintings can still occasionally be seen under the pigment. Drawing charcoal produced from wood that is as homogeneous as possible gives a porous and not very adhesive stroke. The pointed charcoal pencil permits hair-thin lines; if used broadside on the surface, it creates evenly toned planes. Rubbing and pulverizing the charcoal line results in dimmed intermediate shades and delicate transitions. Because of its slight adhesiveness, charcoal is eminently suited to corrective sketching; but if the drawing is to be preserved, it must be protected by a fixative.

      As a medium for quick, probing sketches and practice in studying models, charcoal was once much used in all academies and workshops. The rapid notation of difficult poses, such as Tintoretto demanded of his models, could be done quickly and easily with the adaptable charcoal pencil. While some of these sheets were deemed worthy of preservation, hundreds have surely been lost.

      Charcoal has often been used for portrait drawings to preserve for the eventual painting pictorial tints that were already present in the preliminary sketch. When destined to be autonomous portraits, charcoal drawings are executed in detail; with their sharp accents and delicate modelling, such portraits cover the whole range of the medium. In “Portrait of a Lady,” by the 19th-century French painter Édouard Manet (Manet, Édouard), the grain of the wood in the chair, the fur trimming on the dress, the compactness of the coiffure, and the softness of the flesh are all rendered in the same material: charcoal. Popular as that material was for studies and sketches, it has been used for independent drawings destined for preservation by only a few artists; for example, the 17th-century Dutch painter Paulus Potter (Potter, Paulus). It is somewhat more frequent among the great draftsmen of the 19th and 20th centuries, such as Edgar Degas (Degas, Edgar), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de), Käthe Kollwitz (Kollwitz, Käthe), and Ernst Barlach (Barlach, Ernst).

      Oiled charcoal, with the charcoal pencils dipped in linseed oil, provides better adhesion and a deeper black. Used in the 16th century by Tintoretto, this technique was applied above all by the Dutch draftsmen of the 17th century in order to set deep-black accents. The advantage of better adhesion in the indentations of the paper in contrast to dry charcoal, which sticks to the elevations, has to be paid for, however, by “incorrigibility”; i.e., correction cannot be made. In addition, charcoal crayons that have been deeply dipped in oil show a brownish streak left by the oil alongside the lines; this technique was used in the 20th century by the American artist Susan Rothenberg.

Chalks (chalk drawing)

      The chalks, which resemble charcoal pencils in outward appearance, are an equally important drawing medium. If charcoal was primarily a medium for quick sketching that could be corrected and for the search for artistic form, chalk drawing, which can also fulfill all of these functions, has steadily gained in importance as an autonomous vehicle of expression. Since the end of the 15th century, stone chalk, as found in nature, has become increasingly more significant in art drawing. As a basic material, alumina chalk has various degrees of hardness, so that the stroke varies from slightly granular to homogeneously dense and smooth.

      The attempt to produce a crayon or pencil of the greatest possible uniformity has led to the production of special chalks for drawing; that is, chalks, which, after being pulverized, washed, and molded into convenient sticks, allow a softer and more regular stroke and are also free of sandy particles. The admixture of pigments (carbons in the case of black chalks) creates various tints from a rich black to a brownish gray; compared to the much-used black chalk, the brown variety is of little significance. White chalk, also found in nature, is rarely employed as an independent medium for drawing, although it is frequently used in combination with other mediums in order to achieve reflections of light as individual accents of plastic modelling.

      Beginning with the 15th century, chalk has been used increasingly for studies and sketches. Its suitability for drawing exact lines of any given width and also for laying on finely shaded tints makes it particularly appropriate for modelling studies. Accents that stress plastic phenomena are applied by varying the pressure of the hand. Characteristic details in portrait drawings in particular can be brought out in this manner. Pictorial values as well as light and shadow effects can be rendered with chalk without losing their firm, plastic form. For the same reason, chalk is also most valuable in sketching out paintings and indicating their values.

      All of these qualities explain why chalk is such a good medium for autonomous drawings. Indeed, there is scarcely a draftsman who has not worked in chalk, often in combination with other mediums. Aside from portrait drawings done all over the world, landscapes have formed the main theme of chalk drawings, especially with the Dutch, in whose art landscape drawings have played a large role. Ever since the invention of artificial chalk made of lampblack (a fine, bulky, dull-black soot deposited in incomplete combustion of carbonaceous materials), which possesses a precisely measurable consistency—an invention ascribed to Leonardo da Vinci—the pictorial qualities of chalk drawing have been fully utilized. Chalks range from those that are dry and charcoal-like to the fatty ones used by lithographers.

      Another very important drawing pencil is similarly a chalk product: the red pencil, or sanguine, which contains ferric oxide, which occurs in nature in shadings from dark brown to strong red and can also be manufactured from the same aluminum-oxide base with ferric oxide or rust added. Besides the stronger pictorial effect possible because of its chromatic value, sanguine also possesses a greater suppleness and solubility in water. Thus, a homogeneous plane can be created through moist rubbing, a compact stroke through liquid linear application, a very delicate tone through light wiping. Although this oxide was used for red tints in prehistoric painting, sanguine does not seem to have acquired artistic dignity until the 15th century, when it became customary to fix drawings by painting them over with a gum solution, for sanguine has no more adhesiveness than charcoal. In the 15th century, sanguine was a popular drawing medium because of its wealth of pictorial possibilities. Those inclined to be colorists—such as the portraitists Jean Clouet (Clouet, Jean) and Hans Holbein (Holbein, Hans, the Younger), the Flemish painters around Peter Paul Rubens (Rubens, Peter Paul), and, above all, the French artists of the 18th century—particularly favoured it. The possibilities of sanguine range from suggestive forms with markedly plastic values to a very pictorial, soft rendition of visual surface stimuli.

      A combination of various chalks offers still richer coloristic possibilities. Black chalk and sanguine have been widely used since the 16th century to achieve colour differentiation between flesh tones, hair, and the material of garments. The combination of black and white chalk serves plastic modelling, as does that of the softer sanguine with white chalk; in the former case, the accentuation rests with the black, in the latter, with the more suggestive delineation in white.

      A decidedly coloristic method lies in the combination of various chalk colours with one another and with tinted paper. Such pictorially executed sheets, called à deux crayons (with two colours) and à trois crayons (with three colours), respectively, were especially popular in 17th- and 18th-century France. Antoine Watteau (Watteau, Antoine) reached a previously unheard of harmony of different chalks on natural paper. With the three colours, Nicolas Lancret (Lancret, Nicolas), Jean-Étienne Liotard (Liotard, Jean-Étienne), Jacques-André Portail, François Boucher (Boucher, François)—to name but a few such artists—achieved sensitive drawings that are very appealing coloristically.

      An additional colour refinement is made possible with pastel crayons (pastel). An ample selection of dry colour pigments in pastel crayons, prepared with a minimum of agglutinants and compounded with different shades of white for the articulation of tints, is commercially available. The colours can be laid on in linear technique directly with the crayons, but an area application made with a piece of soft suede or directly, with the fingers, is more frequent. Although this technique was known to the Accademia degli Incamminati (to the painter Guido Reni (Reni, Guido), for example) as early as the 17th century, it did not reach its flowering until the 18th century, especially in France (with Jean-Marc Nattier (Nattier, Jean-Marc) and Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon)) and in Venice (with Rosalba Carriera (Carriera, Rosalba)). Pastel chalks are particularly favoured for portraits; their effect approximates that of colour-and-area painting rather than line drawing.

      In the 19th and 20th centuries, Degas (Degas, Edgar) reverted to a stronger accentuation of the delineatory aspects of drawing. With intermediate varnishes he achieved an overlay drawing with different colours and thus an increased emphasis on individual strokes. This technique, fundamentally different from the older one, was imitated with minor variations by Odilon Redon (Redon, Odilon), Gustave Moreau (Moreau, Gustave), Jean-Édouard Vuillard (Vuillard, Édouard), Pierre Bonnard (Bonnard, Pierre), and others. It has also been borrowed by such Expressionist artists as Edvard Munch (Munch, Edvard) and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig).

      Modern grease chalks offer a chromatic scale of similar range. Developed originally for such technical purposes as the lettering of very smooth surfaces, such as metal or glass, they can be applied in the same flat manner as pastels, although with the opposite aesthetic effect: that of compact colours. It was the 20th-century English sculptor Henry Moore (Moore, Henry) who first and convincingly exploited the feasibility of continuing, with other mediums, such as pen or watercolour, work on the firm surface that had been led out with grease chalks.

Metalpoints (metal point)

      Metalpoints have been used for writing and delineation ever since the scriptoria of antiquity. It required little imagination to employ them also in drawing. The most frequently used material was soft lead, which on a smooth surface comes out pale gray, not very strong in colour, and easily erasable but very suitable for preliminary sketches. Aside from lead, tin and copper were also used, as well as sundry lead-and-pewter alloys. The 15th-century Venetian painter Jacopo Bellini (Bellini, Jacopo)'s book of sketches in London with leadpoint drawings on tinted paper is a particularly valuable example of this technique, even if individual portions and, indeed, entire pages that had become effected were drawn over long ago. One can see little more than the traces left by the pencil because, as in many other metalpoint drawings, the sketches were redrawn in another medium. Botticelli (Botticelli, Sandro), for example, sketched with a leadpoint the outline of his illustrations to Dante's Divine Comedy, retracing them afterward with the pen. Metalpoints were used into the 18th century for perspectivist constructions and auxiliary delineation, especially in architectural drawings.

      More suited to permanent drawing is the silverpoint, which requires special preparation of the foundation and, once applied, cannot be corrected. Its stroke, also pale gray, oxidizes into brown and adheres unerasably. Silverpoint drawings accordingly require a clearer concept of form and a steady hand because corrections remain visible. Because too much pressure can bring about cracks in the foundation, the strokes must be even; emphases, modelling, and light phenomena must be rendered either by means of dense hachures, repetitions, and blanks or else supplemented by other mediums. Despite these difficulties, silverpoint was much used in the 15th and 16th centuries. Dürer's notebook on a journey to Holland shows landscapes, portraits, and various objects that interested him drawn in this demanding technique. Silverpoint was much in demand for portrait drawings from the 15th into the 17th century; revived in the 18th-century Romantic era, it was also used by modern artists, most notably Picasso (Picasso, Pablo).

Graphite point (graphite)

      Toward the end of the 16th century, a new drawing medium was introduced and soon completely displaced metalpoint in sketching and preliminary drawing: the graphite point. Also called Spanish lead after its chief place of origin, this drawing medium was quickly and widely adopted; but because of its soft and smeary consistency it was used for autonomous drawings only by some Dutch painters, and even they employed it mostly in conjunction with other points. (It might be added that the graphite point was originally taken for a metal because its texture shines metallically in slanting light.) The lead pencil (conté crayon), or more properly crayon Conté, became established in art drawing after Nicolas-Jacques Conté (Conté, Nicolas-Jacques) invented, around 1790, a manufacturing process similar to that used in the production of artificial chalk. Purified and washed, graphite could henceforth be made with varying admixtures of clay and in any desired degree of hardness. The hard points, with their durable, clear, and thin stroke layers, were especially suited to the purposes of Neoclassicist and Romantic (Romanticism) draftsmen. The Germans working in Rome, in particular, took advantage of the chance to sketch rapidly and to reproduce, in one and the same medium, subtle differentiations as well as clear proportions of plasticity and light. Among the most masterful pencil artists of all was Ingres (Ingres, J.-A.-D), who presketched systematically in pencil the well-thought-out structure of his paintings.

      The more pictorially inclined artists of the late 19th century preferred softer pencils in order to throw into plastic relief certain areas within the drawing. Seurat (Seurat, Georges), on the other hand, reached back to graphite in his drawings from the concert cafés, among them At the Concert Européen, in which he translated the Pointillistic (Neo-Impressionism) technique (applying dots of colour to a surface so that from a distance they blend together) into the monochrome element of drawing. Pencil frottage (rubbing made on paper laid over a rough surface), first executed by the Surrealist artist Max Ernst (Ernst, Max), represents a marginal kind of drawing, for here the artist's hand is no longer the sole creator of forms.

Coloured crayons (crayon)

      Coloured crayons, in circulation since the late 19th century, offer all the possibilities of black graphite points; and, in combinations, they attain a stronger colour value than chalks because they do not merge with one another. Every line preserves its original and characteristic colour, a form of independence that Gustav Klimt and Picasso exploited to the full.

Incised drawing

      A role apart is that played by incised drawings. Their pronounced linearity gives them the visual appearance of other drawings; materially, however, they represent the opposite principle, that of subtracting from a surface rather than adding to it. Incised drawings are among the oldest documents of human activity. In primitive African cultures, the methods and forms of prehistoric bone and rock drawings have survived into the present. In a decorative and conceivably also symbolic form, incised decorations on pottery have existed for thousands of years; insofar as the comparison is valid, they correspond in every formal respect to applied drawings of the same period. A formal equivalent may also be observed in later times: in the decorative details of implements, especially metal—from the drawings on Greek mirrors, through the jewelry made at the end of the Roman Empire, to the scenes on medieval weapons and, above all, on Renaissance dress armour. More often than not these are drawings that follow certain models rather than free drawings in the sense of sketches.

      Logically, one would also have to consider all niello work under the heading of drawing, because the picture in this case is cut out of the metal and filled with a deep black-coloured paste so that it appears to the eye as a linear projection on a plane. In like manner, work with the graver or burin (cutting tools) and with the etching needle on the engraving plate may be considered to parallel in its execution that gradual effort applied directly to the carrier that was defined earlier as the art of drawing. The difference lies in the fact that this work is not a goal in itself but the prerequisite for a printing process that is intended to be repetitive.

Brush, pen, and dyestuffs

      Of the many possibilities of transferring liquid dyestuffs (dye) onto a plane, two have become particularly significant for art drawing: brush and pen (pen drawing). To be sure, finger painting, as found in prehistoric cave paintings, has occasionally been practiced since the late Renaissance and increasingly so in more recent times. For drawing as such, however, the method is irrelevant. Similarly, the use of pieces of fur, frayed pieces of wood, bundles of straw, and the like is more significant as a first step toward the camel's-hair brush than as indication that these objects were ever drawing mediums in their own right. Although it is antedated by the brush, which in some cultures (East Asia, for example) has remained in continued use, the pen has been the favorite writing and drawing tool ever since classical antiquity.

Pens (pen)

      The principle of transferring dyestuffs with the pen has remained virtually unchanged for thousands of years. The capillary effect of the split tip, cut at a slant, applies the drawing fluid to the surface (parchment, papyrus, and, since the late Middle Ages, almost exclusively paper) in amounts varying with the saturation of the pen and the pressure exerted by the drawing hand. The oldest form is that of the reed pen; cut from papyrus plants, sedge, or bamboo, it stores a reservoir of fluid in its hollow interior. Its stroke—characteristically powerful, hard, and occasionally forked as a result of stronger pressure being applied to the split tip—became a popular medium of artistic expression only with the rise of a subjective view of the artist's personality during the Renaissance. Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn) made superb use of the strong, plastic accents of the reed pen, supplementing it as a rule with other pens or brushes. Beginning in the 19th century with the Dutch artist van Gogh (Gogh, Vincent van), pure reed-pen drawings with a certain forcefulness of expression have been created by many artists. Expressionists such as George Grosz (Grosz, George) used the reed pen frequently.

      If the selection of the reed pen already implies a formal statement of sorts, that of the quill pen opens up a far wider range of possibilities. Ever since the rise of drawing in Western art—that is, since the late Middle Ages—the quill has been the most frequently used instrument for applying liquid mediums to the drawing surface. The importance accorded to this tool is attested by the detailed instructions in painters' manuals about the fashioning of the pen from wing shafts of geese, swans, and even ravens. The supple tip of the quill, available in varying strengths, permits a relatively wide scale of individual strokes—from soft, thin lines, such as those used in preliminary sketches for illustrations in illuminated books, through waxing and waning lines that allow differentiation within the stroke, to energetic, broad lines. It was only when metal pens began to be made of high-grade steel and in different strengths that they became a drawing implement able to satisfy the demands made by the individual artist's hand.

Inks (ink)

      Although all dyestuffs of low viscosity lend themselves to pen drawing, the various inks are most often employed. The manufacture of gallnut ink had been known from the medieval scriptoria (copying rooms set apart for scribes in monasteries). An extract of gallnuts mixed with iron vitriol and thickened with gum-arabic solution produces a writing fluid that comes from the pen black, with a strong hint of purple violet, and dries almost black. In the course of time it turns a darkish brown, so that the writing fluid in old manuscripts and drawings cannot always be identified by the colour alone. In contrast to other brown writing fluids, the more strongly coloured parts of gallnut ink remain markedly darker; and because inks of especially great vitriol content decompose the paper, the drawing, particularly in its more coloured portions, tends to shine through on the reverse side of the sheet. Only industrially produced chemical inks possess the necessary ion balance to forestall this undesirable effect.

      Another ink, one that seems to have found no favour as a writing fluid but has nonetheless had a certain popularity in drawing, is bistre, an easily dissolved, light-to-dark-brown transparent pigment obtained from the soot of the lampblack that coats wood-burning chimneys. Its shade depends both on the concentration and on the kind of wood from which it is derived, hardwoods (especially oaks) producing a darker shade than conifers, such as pine. During the pictorially oriented Baroque period, in the 17th and early 18th centuries, the warm tone that can be thinned at will made bistre a popular medium with which to supplement the planes of a pen drawing.

      Also derived from a carbon base is India ink, made from the soot of exceptionally hard woods, such as olive or grape vines, or from the fatty lampblack of the oil flame, with gum-arabic mixed in as a binding agent. This deep-black, thick fluid preserves its dark tone for a long time and can be thinned with water until it becomes a light gray. Pressed into sticks or bars, it was sold under the name of Chinese ink or India ink. This writing fluid, known already in Egypt and used to this day in China and India, has been manufactured in Europe since the 15th century. Favoured in particular by German and Dutch draftsmen because of its strong colour, it lent itself above all to drawing on tinted paper. Since the 19th century, India ink has been the most popular drawing ink for pen drawings, replacing all other dyestuffs in technical sketches. Only very recently have writing inks gained some significance in art drawing—in connection with the practical fountain pen.

      For a relatively short time, a dyestuff of animal origin, sepia, obtained from the pigment of the cuttlefish, was used for drawing. Known since Roman times, it did not come into general use until the 18th century. Compared to yellowish bistre, it has a cooler and darker tone, and is brown with a trace of violet. Until the 18th century, it was employed by such amateur painters as the poet Goethe because of its effectiveness in depth; as a primary pigment, however, it has been completely replaced by industrially manufactured watercolours.

      Other dyestuffs are of only minor importance compared with these inks, which are primarily used for pen drawings. Minium (red lead) was used in the medieval scriptoria for the decoration of initial letters and also in illustrated pen drawings. Chinese white is easier to apply with a pointed brush because of its thickness; other pigments, among them indigo and green copper sulfate, are rarely found in drawings. For them, too, the brush is a better tool than the pen. The systematically produced watercolours of various shades are almost wholly restricted to technical drawings.

Pen drawings

      In combination with written texts, pen drawings are among the oldest artistic documents. Already in classical times, texts were illustrated with firm contours and sparse interior details. During the Middle Ages, marginal drawings and book illustrations were time and again pre-sketched, if not definitively executed, with the pen. In book painting, decidedly delineatory styles developed in which the brush was also employed in the manner of a pen drawing: for example, in the Carolingian school of Reims, which produced the Utrecht Psalter in the 9th century, and also in southern Germany, where a separate illustrative form with line drawings was widespread with the Biblia Pauperum (“Poor People's Bibles,” biblical picture books used to instruct large numbers of people in the Christian faith). The thin-lined outline sketch is also characteristic of the earliest individual drawings of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Sketches after ancient sculptures or after nature as well as compositions dealing with familiar motifs form the main themes of these drawings. Such sheets were primarily used as models for paintings; gathered in sketchbooks, they were often handed on from one generation to the next. The practical usefulness of these drawings is attested by the supplements added to them by younger artists and by the fact that many metalpoint drawings that had become hard to decipher were redrawn with the pen, as shown by the sketchbooks of the 15th-century Italian artist Antonio Pisanello, now broken up and preserved in several different collections.

      In the 16th century, the artistic range of the pen drawing reached an individual articulation that it hardly ever attained again. Every artist was free to exploit with the pen the formal possibilities that corresponded to his talents. Thus Leonardo used a precise stroke for his scientific drawings; Raphael produced relaxed sketches, in which he probed for forms and variations of form; Michelangelo drew with short strokes reminiscent of chisel work; Titian contrasted light and dark by means of hachures laid broadly over the completed figures. Among the Northerners, Dürer (Dürer, Albrecht) mastered all the possibilities of pen drawing, from quick notation to the painstakingly executed autonomous drawing, ranging from a purely graphic and delineatory technique to a spatial and plastic modelling one; it is no wonder that he stimulated so many other artists. The subjective attitude of the later 16th century is often expressed more clearly in Mannerist drawings—characterized by spatial incongruity and excessive elongation of the human figures, which are as revelatory of the artist's personality as handwriting—than it is in completed works of painting and sculpture. A special form of exact drawing is found in models for engravings; some of these were directly mounted on the wood block; some anticipate the style of the copperplate engraving in the pen-drawing stage, with waxing and waning lines, delicate stroke layers, and cross-hatching for spatial and plastic effects.

      In the 17th century, the pen drawing took second place to combined techniques, especially wash (wash drawing), a sweep or splash of colour, applied with the brush. An open style of drawing that merely hints at contours, along with contrasting thin and powerful strokes, endowed the line itself with expressive qualities. In his numerous drawings, Rembrandt in particular achieved an exceedingly subtle plastic characterization and even light values through the differentiation of stroke layers and the combination of various pens and brushes.

      Additional techniques came to the fore in the 18th century, with the pen sketch providing the scaffold for the drawing that was carried out in a pictorial style. Only decorative sketches and practical studies were laid out more often as linear drawings.

      The closed, thin-contour drawing regained its importance with Neoclassicism at the end of the 18th century. The Nazarenes (Nazarene) (the nickname of the Lucas Brotherhood—later Guild of St. Luke, who lived in monastic style) and Romantics consciously referred to the early Renaissance manner of drawing, modelling with thin lines. With closed contours, carefully set hair-and-shadow strokes, and precise parallel hachures, they attained plastic values by purely graphic means.

      This technique was again followed by a more pictorially oriented phase, culminating in the late 19th century in the recognition of drawing as the most immediate and personal expression of the artist's hand. The pure pen drawing took its place by the side of other highly esteemed art forms. The English Art Nouveau artist Aubrey Beardsley (Beardsley, Aubrey) at the end of the 19th century applied the direct black–white contrast to planes, while in the 20th century the French masters Henri Matisse (Matisse, Henri) and Picasso (Picasso, Pablo) reduced the object to a mere line that makes no claim to corporeal illusion. A large number of illustrators, as well as the artists who draw the comic strips, prefer the clear pen stroke. In the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky (Kandinsky, Wassily)'s nonrepresentational compositions, finally, the independence of the line as an autonomous formal value became a new theme in drawing. In the hair-thin automatist seismograms (so-called because of their resemblance to the records of earthquakes) of the 20th-century German artist Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze), which are sensitive to the slightest stirring of the hand, this theme leads to a new dimension transcending all traditional concepts of a representational art of drawing.

Brush drawings

      Although the brush is best suited to the flat application of pigments—in other words, to painting—its use in a clearly delineatory function, with the line dominating and (a crucial property of brush drawing) in monochrome fashion, can be traced back to prehistoric times.

      All of the above-mentioned drawing inks have been used as dyes in brush drawings, often with one and the same pigment employed in combined pen-and-brush work. Still greater differentiation in tone is often obtained through concentrated or thinned mediums and with the addition of supplementary ones. To the latter belong chiefly distemper, a paint in which the pigments are mixed with an emulsion of egg or size or both, and watercolours, which can be used along with bistre and drawing ink. Even oils can sometimes be used for individual effects in drawing, as in the works of Jacob Jordaens (Jordaens, Jacob).

      Sinopia, the preliminary sketch for a monumental wall painting, was done with the brush and has all the characteristics of a preparatory, form-probing drawing. The sketch was carried out directly on the appropriate spot and covered over with a thin layer of plaster, on which the pictorial representation was then painted.

      The brush drawing differs from the pen drawing by its greater variation in stroke width, and by the stroke itself, which sets in more smoothly and is altogether less severely bordered. Early brush drawings nonetheless show a striking connection with the technique of the pen drawing. The early examples of the 15th century completely follow the flow of contemporaneous pen drawings. Leonardo's or Dürer's pen drawings, with their short, waxing and waning stroke layers, refine the system of pen drawing; many 16th-century artists used a comparable technique. The brush drawing for chiaroscuro sheets on tinted paper was popular because Chinese white, the main vehicle of delineation in this method, is more easily applied with the brush than the pen and because the intended pictorial effect is more easily attained, thanks to the possibility of changing abruptly to a plane representation.

      Such representations are particularly distinctive as done by Vittore Carpaccio (Carpaccio, Vittore) and Palma il Giovane in Venice and in a Mannerist spotting technique used by Parmigianino. In the 16th century, the brush nevertheless played a greater role as a supporting than as an independently form-giving instrument. Pure brush drawings were rare even in the 17th century, although the brush played a major role in landscapes, in which, by tinting of varying intensity, it ideally fulfilled the need to provide for all desired degrees of spatial depth and strength of lighting. Dutch artists, such as Adriaen Brouwer (Brouwer, Adriaen), Adriaen van Ostade (Ostade, Adriaen van), and Jan Steen (Steen, Jan), as well as the French artist Claude Lorrain, transcended the limits of drawing in the narrower meaning of the term by doing brushwork limited to a few tones within a monochrome scale, giving the impression of a pictorial watercolour.

      Although the coloristically inclined 18th century was little interested in the restriction to a few shadings within one colour value, Jean-Honoré Fragonard raised this technique to perfection, with all its possibilities of sharply accented contours, soft delineation, delicate tones, and deep shadows. The brush drawings of the Spanish painter Francisco Goya (Goya, Francisco de) must also be counted among the great achievements of this technique. In his strong plastic effects, the English painter George Romney made the most of the contrast between the white foundation and the broad brushstrokes tinted in varying intensities. Other English artists, among them Alexander Cozens (Cozens, Alexander), John Constable (Constable, John), and J.M.W. Turner (Turner, J.M.W.), took advantage of the delicately graded pictorial possibilities for their landscape studies.

      In the 19th century, the French artists Théodore Géricault (Géricault, Théodore), Eugène Delacroix (Delacroix, Eugène), and Constantin Guys (Guys, Constantin) still followed the character of the brush drawing, even though it was already being replaced by the variegated watercolour and gouache painting, a method of painting with opaque colours that have been ground in water and mingled with a preparation of gum. In modern drawing, the brush has regained some importance as an effective medium for contrasting planes and as carrier of the theme; in this, the dry brush has proven itself a useful tool for the creation of a granular surface structure.

Combinations of various techniques

      The combination of various techniques plays a greater role in drawing than in all other art forms. Yet it is necessary, in the numerous drawings in which two or more mediums are involved, to distinguish between those in which the mediums were changed in the course of artistic genesis and those in which an artistic effect based on a combination of mediums was intended from the beginning.

      In the first case, one is confronted with a preliminary sketch, as it were, of the eventual drawing: the basic structure with some variations is tried out in charcoal, chalk, metalpoint, pencil, or some other (preferably dry and easily corrected) material and then carried out in a stronger and more durable medium. Most pen drawings are thus superimposed on a preliminary sketch. The different materials actually represent two separate stages of the same artistic process.

      More relevant artistically is the planned combination of different techniques that are meant to complement each other. The most significant combination from the stylistic point of view is that of pen and brush, with the pen delineating the contours that denote the object and the brush providing spatial and plastic as well as pictorial—that is, colour—values. The simplest combined form is manuscript illumination, where the delineated close contours are filled in with colour. The drawing may actually be improved if this is done by a hand other than the draftsman's or at a later time.

      More important is brushwork that supplements linear drawing, in which entire segments may be given over to one technique or the other; for example, the considerable use of white (which is hard to apply with the pen) in drawings on tinted paper. In similar complementary fashion the brush may be used for plastic modelling as a way of highlighting, that is indicating the spots that receive the greatest illumination. The technique of combined pen-and-brush drawing was favoured by the draftsmen of Germany and the Netherlands, especially in the circle around Dürer and the south German Danube School. Shadows, too, can be inserted in a drawing with dark paint. The illusion of depth can also be achieved with white and dark colours in a pure chalk technique.

      In contrast to these methods, which still belong to a linear system of drawing, is the flat differentiation of individual segments of a work in (usually) the same medium: wash (wash drawing). Various bodies and objects are evenly tinted with the brush within or along the drawn contours. Planes are thus contrasted with lines, enhancing the illusionary effect of plasticity, space, and light and shadow. This modelling wash has been used again and again since the 16th century, sometimes in combination with charcoal, chalk, or pencil drawings. A further refinement, used particularly in landscape drawings, is wash in varying intensities; additional shadings in the sense of atmospheric phenomena, such as striking light and haze merging into fog and cloud, can be rendered through thinning of the colour or repeated covering over a particular spot. A chromatic element entered drawing with the introduction of diluted indigo, known in the Netherlands from the East India trade; it is not tied to objects but used in spatial and illusionist fashion, by Paul Brill (Brill, Paul) and Hans Bol in the 16th and 17th centuries, for example. The mutual supplementation and correlation of pen and brush in the wash technique was developed most broadly and consistently in the 17th century, in which the scaffold, so to speak, of the pen drawing became lighter and more open, and brushwork integrated corporeal and spatial zones. The transition from one technique to the other—from wash pen drawings to brush drawings with pen accents—took place without a break. Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin (Poussin, Nicolas) in 16th- and 17th-century France are major representatives of the latter technique, and Rembrandt once again utilized all its possibilities to the full.

      Whereas this method served—within the general stylistic intentions of the 17th century—primarily to elucidate spatial and corporeal proportions, the artists of the 18th century employed it to probe this situation visually with the aid of light. The unmarked area, the spot left empty, has as much representational meaning as the pen contours, the lighter or darker brush accent, and the tinted area.

      The art of omission plays a still greater role, if possible, in the later 19th century and in the 20th. Paul Cézanne (Cézanne, Paul)'s late sheets, with their sparse use of the pencil and the carefully measured out colour nuances, may be considered the epitome of this technique. As the colouring becomes increasingly varied through the use of watercolours (watercolour) to supplement a pen or metalpoint drawing, one leaves the concept of drawing in the strict sense of the term. According to the quality and quantity of the mediums employed, one then speaks of “drawings with watercolour,” “watercolourized drawings,” and “watercolours on preliminary drawings.” The predominant stroke character, rather than the fact that paper is the carrier, is the chief feature when deciding whether or not the work may legitimately be called a drawing.

      The combination of dry and fluid drawing mediums provides a genuine surface contrast that may be exploited for sensuous differentiation. Here again a distinction must be made between various ways of applying the identical medium—for example, charcoal and charcoal dust in a water solution or, more frequently, sanguine and sanguine rubbed in with a wet brush—and the stronger contrast brought about by the use of altogether different mediums. Chalk drawings are frequently washed with bistre or watercolour, after the principle of the washed pen drawing. Stronger contrasts, however, can be obtained if the differing techniques are employed graphically, as the Flemish draftsmen of the 17th century liked to do. The Chinese ink wash of chalk drawings also contributes to the illusion of spatial depth. Along with such Dutch painters as Jan van Goyen (Goyen, Jan van) and members of the family van de Velde, Claude Lorrain achieved great mastery in this technique. The differentiated treatment of the foreground with pen and brush and the background with chalk renders spatial depth plausible and plastic. In modern art, the use of different mediums—whether for plastic differentiation, such as Henry Moore (Moore, Henry) carried out with unequalled mastery in his “Shelter Drawings,” or only for the purpose of contrasting varied surface stimuli of nonrepresentational compositions as well as the enrichment with colours and even with collage elements (the addition of paper, metal, or other actual objects) broadens the concept of the drawing so that it becomes an autonomous picture the mixed technique of which transcends the borderline between drawing and painting.

Mechanical devices

      Mechanical aids are far less important for art drawing than for any other art form. Many draftsmen reject them altogether as unartistic and inimical to the creative aspect of drawing.

      Apart from the crucial importance that mechanical aids have had and continue to have for all kinds of construction diagrams, plans, and other applied drawings, some mechanical aids have been used in varying but significant measure for artistic drawings. The ruler, triangle, and compass as basic geometric instruments have played a major role, especially in periods in which artists created in a consciously constructionist and perspectivist manner. Marks for perspective constructions may be seen in many drawings of early and High Renaissance vintage.

      For perspectively correct rendition, the graticulate frame, marked off in squares to facilitate proportionate enlargement or reduction, allowed the object to be drawn to be viewed in line with a screen on the drawing surface. Fixed points can be marked with relative ease on the resultant system of coordinates. For portrait drawings, the glass board used into the 19th century had contours and important interior reference points marked on it with grease crayons or soap sticks, so that they could be transferred onto paper by tracing or direct copying. Both processes are frequently used for preliminary sketches for engravings to be duplicated, as is the screened transmission of a preliminary sketch onto the engraving plate or, magnifying, the painting surface. In such cases the screen lies over the preparatory drawing.

      Mirrors (mirror) and mirror arrangements with reducing convex mirrors or concave lenses were likewise used (especially in the 17th and 18th centuries) as drawing aids in the preparation of reproductions. Even when it was a matter of the most exact rendition of topographical views, such apparatus, as well as the camera obscura (a darkened enclosure having an aperture usually provided with a lens through which light from external objects enters to form an image on the opposite surface), were frequently employed. In a darkened room the desired section is reflected through a lens onto a slanting mirror and from that inverse image is reflected again onto the horizontally positioned drawing surface. Lateral correction can be obtained by means of a second mirror.

      Unless the proportions do not allow it, true-to-scale reducing or enlarging can also be carried out with the aid of the tracing instrument called the pantograph. When copying, the crayon or pencil inserted in the unequally long feet of the device reproduces the desired contours on the selected scale.

      Most of these aids were thus used in normal studio practice and for the preparation of certain applied drawings. Equally practical, but useful only for closely circumscribed tasks, were elliptic compasses, curved rulers, and stencils, particularly for ornamental and decorative purposes. Only a few present-day artists, notably Jasper Johns (Johns, Jasper), use stencils or simple blocks with a given shape in larger scale composition, in order to obtain the effect of repetition, often in an arbitrary use, in “alienating” technique and colour.

      Mechanically produced drawings—such as typewriter sketches, computer drawings, oscillograms—and drawings done with the use of a projector, all of which can bring forth unusual and attractive results, nevertheless do not belong to the topic because they lack the immediate creativity of the art drawing.

Applied drawings

      Applied and technical drawings differ in principle from art drawings in that they record unequivocally an objective set of facts and on the whole disregard aesthetic considerations. The contrast to the art drawing is sharpest in the case of technical project drawings, the purpose of which is to convey not so much visual plausibility as to give exact information that makes possible the realization of an idea. Such plans for buildings, machines, and technical systems are not instantly readable because of the orthogonal (independent) projection, the division into separate planes of projection, and the use of symbols. Prepared as a rule with such technical aids as ruler and compass, they represent a specialized language of their own, which must be learned. For topographic (detailed delineation of the features of a place) and cartographic (map-making) drawings, too, a special terminology has developed that above all systematizes spatial representations, making them intelligible to the expert with the aid of emblems and symbols.

      Equally far removed from any claim to artistic standing are most illustrations serving scientific purposes, the aim of which is to record as objectively as possible the characteristic and typical features of a given phenomenon. The systematic drawings, used especially in the natural sciences to explain a system or a function, resemble plans; descriptive and naturalistic illustrations, on the other hand, approach the illusionistic plausibility of visual experience and can attain an essentially artistic character. A good many artists have drawn scientific illustrations, and their works—the botanical and zoological drawings of the Swiss Merian family in the 17th and 18th centuries, for example—are today more esteemed for their artistic than for their documentary value.

      Of a similarly ambivalent nature is the illustrative drawing that perhaps does not go beyond a simple pictorial rendition of a literary description but because of its specific formal execution may still satisfy the highest artistic demands. Great artists have again and again illustrated Bibles, prayerbooks, novels, and literature of all kinds. Some of the famous examples are Botticelli (Botticelli, Sandro)'s illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy and Dürer's marginal illustrations for the emperor Maximilian's prayer book. Some artists have distinguished themselves more as illustrators than as autonomous draftsmen, as for example the 18th-century German engraver Daniel Chodowiecki (Chodowiecki, Daniel), the 19th-century caricaturist Honoré Daumier (Daumier, Honoré), the 19th-century satiric artist Wilhelm Busch (Busch, Wilhelm), and the 20th-century Austrian illustrator Alfred Kubin (Kubin, Alfred).

      Clearly connected with illustrative drawing is caricature, which, by formally overemphasizing the characteristic traits of a person or situation, creates a suggestive picture that—precisely because of its distortion—engraves itself on the viewer's mind. This special kind of drawing was done by such great artists as Leonardo, Dürer, and the 17th-century artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini (Bernini, Gian Lorenzo) and by draftsmen who, often for purposes of social criticism, have devoted themselves wholly to caricaturing, such as the 18th-century Italian Pier Leone Ghezzi (Ghezzi, Pier Leone), the 19th-century Frenchman Grandville (professional name of Jean-Ignace-Isidore Gérard), the 19th-century American political cartoonist Thomas Nast (Nast, Thomas), and the 20th-century American Al Hirschfeld (Hirschfeld, Al).

      From such overdrawn types developed continuous picture stories that could dispense to a considerable extent with the explanatory text. Modern cartoons (cartoon) are based on these picture stories. Through the formally identical treatment of peculiar types, these drawings acquire an element of consecutiveness that, by telling a continuing story, adds a temporal dimension to two-dimensional drawing. This element is strongest in trick drawings that fix on paper, in brief segments of movement, invented creatures and phenomena that lack all logical plausibility; a rapid sequence of images (leafing through the pages, seeing it projected on the screen) turns the whole into apparent motion, the fundamental process of animation. The artistic achievement, if any, lies in the original invention; its actual realization is predetermined and sometimes carried out by a large and specialized staff of collaborators, often with the aid of stencils and traced designs. Moreover, since the final result is partially determined by the mechanical multiplication, an essential criterion of drawing—the unity of work and result—does not apply.

Subject matter of drawing

      Anything in the visible or imagined universe may be the theme of a drawing. In practice, however, by far the greatest number of art drawings in the Western world deal with the human figure. This situation springs from the close bond between drawing and painting: in sketches, studies, and compositions, drawing prepared the way for painting by providing preliminary clarification and some formal predetermination of the artist's concept of a given work. Many drawings now highly regarded as independent works were originally “bound,” or “latent,” in that they served the ends of painting or sculpture. Yet, so rounded, self-contained, and aesthetically satisfying are these drawings that their erstwhile role as handmaidens to the other pictorial arts can be reconstructed only from knowledge of the completed work, not from the drawing itself. This situation is especially true of a pictorial theme that acquired, at a relatively early stage, an autonomous rank in drawing itself: the portrait.

Portraits

      Drawn 15th-century portraits—by Pisanello or Jan van Eyck, for example—may be considered completed pictorial works in their concentration, execution, and distribution of space. The clear, delicately delineated representation follows every detail of the surface, striving for realism. The profile, rich in detail, is preferred; resembling relief, it is akin to the medallion. Next in prominence to the pure profile, the three-quarter profile, with its more spatial effect, came to the fore, to remain for centuries the classic portrait stance.

      The close relationship to painting applies to practically all portrait drawings of the 15th century. Even so forceful a work as Dürer's drawing of the emperor Maximilian originated as a portrait study for a painting. At the same time, however, some of Dürer's portrait drawings clearly embody the final stage of an artistic enterprise, an ambivalence that can also be observed in other 16th-century portraitists. The works of Jean and François Clouet in France and of the younger Hans Holbein in Switzerland and even more markedly in England in the same century bestowed an autonomy on portrait drawing, especially when a drawing was completed in chalk of various colours. The choice of the softer medium, the contouring, which for all its exactitude is less severely self-contained, and the more delicate interior drawing with plane elements gives these drawings a livelier, more personal character and accentuates once more their proximity to painting.

      In polychromatic chalk technique and pastel, portrait drawing maintained its independence into the 19th century. In the 18th century, Quentin de La Tour, François Boucher, and Jean-Baptiste Chardin—all of these artists from France—were among its chief practitioners, and even Ingres, living in the 19th century, still used its technique. In pastel painting, the portrait outweighed all other subjects.

      In the choice of pose, type, and execution, portrait painting, like other art forms, is influenced by the general stylistic features of an epoch. Thus, the extreme pictorial attitude of the late Baroque and Rococo was followed by a severer conception during Neoclassicism, which preferred monochrome techniques and cultivated as well the special form of the silhouette, a profile contour drawing with the area filled in in black. Unmistakably indebted to their 15th-century predecessors, the creators of portrait drawings of the early 19th century aimed once more at the exact rendition of detail and plastic effects gained through the most carefully chosen graphic mediums: the thin, hard pencil was their favourite instrument, and the silverpoint, too, was rediscovered by the Romantics.

      More interested in the psychological aspects of portraiture, late 19th- and 20th-century draftsmen prefer the softer crayons that readily follow every artistic impulse. The seizing of characteristic elements and an adequate plane rendition weigh more heavily with them than realistic detail. Mood elements, intellectual tension, and personal engagement are typical features of the modern portrait and thus also of modern portrait drawing, an art that continues to document the artist's personal craftsmanship beyond the characteristics of various techniques.

Landscapes

      As early as the 15th century, landscape drawings, too, attained enough autonomy so that it is hard to distinguish between the finished study for the background of a particular painting and an independent, self-contained sketched landscape. Already in Jacopo Bellini's (Bellini, Jacopo) 15th-century sketchbooks (preserved in albums in the British Museum and the Louvre), there is an intimate connection between nature study and pictorial structure; in Titian's studio in the 16th century, landscape sketches must have been displayed as suggestions for pictorial backgrounds.

      But it was Dürer (Dürer, Albrecht) who developed landscape as a recollected image and autonomous work of art, in short, as a theme of its own without reference to other works. His watercolours above all but also the drawings of his two Italian journeys, of the surroundings of Nürnberg, and of the journey to the Netherlands, represent the earliest pure landscape drawings. Centuries had to pass before such drawings occurred again in this absolute formulation.

      Landscape elements were also very significant in 16th-century German and Dutch drawings and illustrations. The figurative representation, still extant in most cases, is formally quite integrated into the romantic forest-and-meadow landscape, particularly in the works of the Danube school—Albrecht Altdorfer (Altdorfer, Albrecht) and Wolf Huber (Huber, Wolf), for example. More frequently than in other schools, one finds here carefully executed nature views. In the Netherlands, Pieter Bruegel drew topographical views as well as free landscape compositions, in both cases as autonomous works.

      In the 17th century, the nature study and the landscape drawing that grew out of it reached a new high. The landscape drawings of the Accademia degli Incamminati (those of Domenichino, for example) combined classical and mythological themes with heroic landscapes. The Frenchman Claude Lorrain, living in Rome, frequently worked under the open sky, creating landscape drawings with a hitherto unattained atmospheric quality. This type of cultivated and idealized landscape, depicted also by Poussin and other Northerners residing in Rome (they were called Dutch Romanists in view of the fact that so many artists from the Netherlands lived in Rome, their drawings of Italy achieving an almost ethereal quality), is in contrast with the unheroic, close-to-nature concept of landscape held primarily by the Netherlanders when depicting the landscape of their native country. All landscape painters—their landscape paintings a specialty that was strongly represented in the artistically specialized Low Countries—also created independent landscape drawings (Jan van Goyen (Goyen, Jan van) and Jacob van Ruisdael (Ruisdael, Jacob van) and his uncle and cousin, for example), with Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn) again occupying a special position: capturing the characteristics of a region often with only a few strokes, he enhanced them in such manner that they acquire monumental expressive power even in the smallest format. In 18th-century Italy, the topographically faithful landscape drawing gained in importance with the advent of the Vedutisti (veduta), the purveyors of “views,” forming a group by themselves (among them, Giambattista Piranesi and Canaletto [Giovanni Antonio Canal]) and often working with such optical aids as the graticulate frame and camera obscura. Landscape drawings of greater artistic freedom, as well as imaginary landscapes, were done most successfully by some French artists, among them Hubert Robert (Robert, Hubert); pictorially and atmospherically, these themes reached a second flowering in the brush-drawn landscapes of such English artists as Turner (Turner, J.M.W.) and Alexander Cozens (Cozens, Alexander), whose influence extends well into the 20th century.

      Given their strong interest in delineation, the 18th-century draftsmen of Neoclassicism and, even more, of Romanticism observed nature with topographical accuracy. As a new “discovery,” the romantically and heroically exaggerated Alpine world now took its place in the artist's mind alongside the arcadian view of the Italian landscape.

      Landscape drawings and even more, watercolours, formed an inexhaustible theme in the 19th century. The French artist Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (Corot, Camille) and, toward the end of the century, Cézanne (Cézanne, Paul) and van Gogh (Gogh, Vincent van), were among the chief creators of landscape drawings. Landscapes formed part of the work of many 20th-century draftsmen, but, for much of the century, the genre as such took second place to general problems of form, in which the subject was treated merely as a starting point. However, during the last 30 years of the 20th century, a large number of American artists returned to representation, thus reinvesting in the landscape as a subject.

Figure compositions and still lifes

      Compared to the main themes of autonomous drawing—portraiture and landscape—all others are of lesser importance. Figure compositions depend greatly on the painting of their time and are often directly connected with it. There were, to be sure, artists who dealt in their drawings with the themes of monumental painting, such as the 17th-century engraver and etcher Raymond de La Fage; in general, however, the artistic goal of figure composition is the picture, with the drawing representing but a useful aid and a way station. Genre scenes, especially popular in the 17th-century Low Countries (as done by Adriaen Brouwer (Brouwer, Adriaen), Adriaen van Ostade (Ostade, Adriaen van), and Jan Steen (Steen, Jan), for example) and in 18th-century France and England, did attain some independent standing. In the 19th century, too, there were drawings that told stories of everyday life; often illustrative in character, they may be called “small pictures,” not only on account of the frequently multicoloured format but also in their artistic execution.

      Still lifes (still-life painting) can also lay claim to being autonomous drawings, especially the representations of flowers, such as those of the Dutch artist Jan van Huysum (Huysum, Jan van), which have been popular ever since the 17th century. Here, again, it is true that a well-designed arrangement transforms an immediate nature study into a pictorial composition. In some of these compositions the similarity to painting is very strong; the pastels of the 19th- and 20th-century artist Odilon Redon (Redon, Odilon), for instance, or the work of the 20th-century German Expressionist Emil Nolde (Nolde, Emil), with its chromatic intensity, transcend altogether the dividing line between drawing and painting. In still lifes, as in landscapes, autonomous principles of form are more important to modern artists than the factual statement.

Fanciful and nonrepresentational drawings

      Drawings with imaginary and fanciful themes are more independent of external reality. Dream apparitions, metamorphoses, and the entwining of separate levels and regions of reality have been traditional themes. The late 15th-century phantasmagoric works of Hieronymus Bosch (Bosch, Hiëronymus) are an early example. There are allegorical peasant scenes by the 16th-century Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel and the carnival etchings of the 17th-century French artist Jacques Callot (Callot, Jacques). Others whose works illustrate what can be done with drawing outside landscape and portraiture are: the 18th-century Italian engraver Giambattista Piranesi, the 18th-century Anglo-Swiss artist Henry Fuseli (Fuseli, Henry), the 19th-century English illustrator Walter Crane (Crane, Walter), the 19th-century French Symbolist artist Gustave Moreau, and the 20th-century Surrealists.

 Nonrepresentational art (abstract art), with its reduction of the basic elements of drawing—point, line, plane—to pure form, offered new challenges. Through renunciation of associative corporeal and spatial relationships, the unfolding of the dimensions of drawing and the structure of the various mediums acquire new significance. The graphic qualities of the line in the plane as well as the unmarked area had already been emphasized in earlier times—for example, in the grotteschi of Giuseppe Arcimboldo (Arcimboldo, Giuseppe) in the 16th century (the fanciful or fantastic representations of human and animal forms often combined with each other and interwoven with representations of foliage, flowers, fruit, or the like) and in calligraphic exercises such as moresques (strongly stylized linear ornament, based on leaves and blossoms)—but mostly as printing or engraving models for the most disparate decorative tasks (interior decoration, furniture, utensils, jewelry, weapons, and the like).

Artistic architectural drawings

      There is one field in which drawing fulfills a distinct function: artistic architectural drawings are a final product as drawings, differing from the impersonal, exact plans and designs by the same “handwriting” character that typifies art drawings. In many cases, no execution of these plans was envisaged; since the early Renaissance, such ideal plans have been drawn to symbolize, in execution and accessories, an abstract content. Despite the often considerable exactitude with which the plans are drawn, the personal statement predominates in the flow of the line. This personal note clearly identifies the drawings of such artists and architects as Albrecht Altdorfer (Altdorfer, Albrecht), Leonardo, Michelangelo, Bernini, Francesco Borromini (Borromini, Francesco), and Piranesi (Piranesi, Giovanni Battista). Also distinct from the ground-plan type of architectural drawing are the art drawings of autonomous character created by such 20th-century architects as Erich Mendelsohn (Mendelsohn, Erich) and Le Corbusier (Corbusier, Le).

History of drawing

Western

      As an artistic endeavour, drawing is almost as old as mankind. In an instrumental, subordinate role, it developed along with the other arts in antiquity and the Middle Ages. Whether preliminary sketches for mosaics and murals or architectural drawings and designs for statues and reliefs within the variegated artistic production of the Gothic medieval building and artistic workshop, drawing as a nonautonomous auxiliary skill was subordinate to the other arts. Only in a very limited sense can one speak of centres of drawing in the early and High Middle Ages; that is, the scriptoria of the monasteries of Corbie and Reims in France, as well as those of Canterbury and Winchester in England, and also a few places in southern Germany, where various strongly delineatory (graphically illustrated) styles of book illumination were cultivated.

14th, 15th, and 16th centuries

      In the West, the history of drawing as an independent artistic document began toward the end of the 14th century. If its development was independent, however, it was not insular. Just as the greatest draftsmen have been for the most part also distinguished painters, illustrators, sculptors, or architects, so the centres and the high points of drawing have generally coincided with the leading localities and the major epochs of the other arts. Moreover, the same stylistic phenomena have been expressed in drawing as in other art forms. Indeed, drawing shares with other art forms the characteristics of individual style, period style, and regional features. Drawing differs, however, in that it interprets and renders these characteristics in terms of its own unique mediums.

      Drawing became an independent art form in northern Italy, at first quite within the framework of ordinary studio activity. But with nature studies, copies of antiques, and drafts in the various sketchbooks (those of Giovannino de'Grassi, Antonio Pisanello, and Jacopo Bellini (Bellini, Jacopo), for example), the tradition of the Bauhütten studio workshop changed to individual work: the place of “exempla,” models, reproduced in formalized fashion was now being taken by subjectively probing and partially creative drawings. In the early 15th century the international Soft Style of the period still largely predominated over the draftsman's individual “handwriting.” At mid-century, however, the differentiation of drawing style according to region and the artist's personality set in. Essential criteria, destined to remain characteristic for generations, begin to strike the eye.

      In drawing produced north of the Alps, the characteristic features lie in the tendency to pictorial compactness and precise execution of detail. Many painters produced individual drawings, but the most notable draftsmen are the otherwise unidentified 15th-century German Master of the Housebook (Housebook, Master of the) and his contemporary Martin Schongauer (Schongauer, Martin). Both of these artists were also major copperplate engravers, so that it is not always easy to determine whether the work is a preliminary sketch or an independent drawing.

      In Italian Renaissance drawings, of which there are a great many, the diverging stylistic features of the various artistic regions were particularly evident. What they had in common was the overwhelming importance of the sketch and the study, in contrast to the far rarer finished drawings. The formal and thematic connection with painting is very close even when it was not a question of preliminary drawings. The draftsmen of Venice and northern Italy preferred an open form with loose and interrupted delineation in order to achieve even in drawing the pictorial effect that corresponded to their painters' imagination.

 In central Italy, on the other hand, and especially in Florence, it was the clear contour that predominated, the closed and firmly circumscribed form, the static and plastic character. Corresponding to the functional purpose of drawing, the individual artists' studios (which, as was the case with the Medicis' Academy of St. Mark, also had to engage in general educational and humanistic investigations) formed the most significant centres of art drawing. In these large studios, drawing served not only for the probing realization of creative ideas, it was not only study and mediator between the conception and the master's finished work; it functioned also as teaching aid for the assistants who worked with the master and as a vehicle for the formation and preservation of an individual workshop tradition. Although Leonardo (Leonardo da Vinci)'s scientific interests were expressed in a large number of drawings, his ideal concept of the human figure is much more frequently preserved in the drawings of his collaborators and successors than in his own. Raphael and Michelangelo were also outstanding draftsmen. Each of them used drawing in order to allow his thoughts about individual works to mature; each had a highly personal drawing style, the one with a soft and rounded stroke, the other with a sculptor's intermittent and powerful stroke. Probably a great deal of drawing was done in Raphael's studio, especially if only for the preparation of the engravings after Raphael's compositions. From Michelangelo's hand came the first so-called connoisseur drawings that are esteemed as a personal document. They are the precursors of the collector's drawings that began in the later 16th century (autonomous works, destined for collections).

 North of the Alps the autonomy of drawing was championed in the first instance by Albrecht Dürer (Dürer, Albrecht), an indefatigable draftsman who mastered all techniques and exercised an enduring and widespread influence. The delineatory constituent clearly predominates even in his paintings. This corresponds to the general stylistic character of 16th-century German art, within which Matthias Grünewald (Grünewald, Matthias), with his freer, broader, and therefore more pictorial style of drawing, and the painters of the Danube school, with their ornamentalizing and agitated stroke, represent significant exceptions. In their metamorphosing of the perceived reality into drawings, the landscapes of Albrecht Altdorfer (Altdorfer, Albrecht) and Wolf Huber (Huber, Wolf) in particular are astonishing documents of a feeling for nature that might almost be called Romantic.

 Soberer, incredibly compact in their pictorial concept and yet akin to the Renaissance in their objective viewing, were the portrait drawings of Hans Holbein, the Younger (Holbein, Hans, the Younger), whose sojourns in 16th-century England proved stimulating to other artists as well. Similar, if less personal than Holbein because of the stricter linearity of their work, were the drawings of the French portraitists Jean (Clouet, Jean) and François Clouet (Clouet, François). In the Low Countries, where they were combined with the idealized image of Italy (as in the drawings of Lucas van Leyden), Dürer's methods gained lasting popularity in the landscape drawings and studies “after life” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Bruegel, Pieter, the Elder).

      Drawing acquired a pivotal significance in the period of Mannerism (c. 1525–1600), both as a document of artistic invention and as a means of its realization. Jacopo da Pontormo (Pontormo, Jacopo da) in Florence, Parmigianino in northern Italy, and Tintoretto in Venice used point and pen as essential and spontaneous vehicles of expression. Their drawings were clearly related to their painting, both in content and in the graphic method of sensitive contouring and daringly drawn foreshortening.

17th, 18th, and 19th centuries

      In the early 17th century, Jacques Callot (Callot, Jacques) rose to prominence in French art: gifted as a draftsman above all, he recorded with the pen his clever inventions and great picture stories, primarily in bold abbreviations.

      The importance of drawing for an artist's growth and the widening of his horizon is attested also by the work of Peter Paul Rubens (Rubens, Peter Paul), whose studies and sketches make up an integral part of his creative achievement. In order to disseminate his pictorial themes and concept of form, he maintained his own school for draftsmen and engravers. Among the circle of Flemings around him, Jacob Jordaens (Jordaens, Jacob) and Sir Anthony Van Dyck (Van Dyck, Sir Anthony) are notable as draftsmen with a style of their own.

      Hercules Seghers (Seghers, Hercules Pietersz) was among the most fascinating artists of the 17th century, a creator of drawn and etched landscapes that he continued to rework while experimenting with printing processes. From the point of view of technique and form, he was important for the greatest artist of Holland, Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn). Seghers combined great inventiveness, especially in his interpretations of Old Testament motifs, and broad mastery of all the techniques of drawing. In his studio, too, drawing was emphasized as a teaching aid and a means of formal experimentation.

      Most Dutch painters of the 17th century, such as the van de Velde family, Brouwer, van Ostade, Pieter Saenredam, and Paulus Potter, were also industrious draftsmen who recorded their special thematic concerns in drawings that were largely completed. Beyond serving as preparation for paintings, these were regarded as autonomous works representing the final stage of the creative process.

      In 17th-century Italy, drawing by way of artistic practice and experimentation became established in the academies, especially in Bologna. More significant, however, was the continuing development of landscape drawing, as initiated by the brothers Agostino (Carracci, Agostino) and Annibale Carracci (Carracci, Annibale) and articulated further by Domenichino and Salvator Rosa (Rosa, Salvator). The French artist Claude Lorrain so developed the landscape drawing of the Roman countryside that it became almost a genre of its own; in his works, which were often intended for sale, nature study and an idealized pictorial concept are uniquely merged. In detailed studies directly before the object, he achieved a timeless validity. Like Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin (Poussin, Nicolas) also drew under the open sky. Using various techniques, he combined realistic experiences and humanistic concepts in idealizing compositions the figures and scenes of which are harmoniously integrated into a spacious landscape. This open-air painting and drawing was practiced also by some other artists who spent a considerable time in Rome—the Dutch artists Jan Asselijn, Claes Berchem, Karel Dujardin, and Adam Pijnacker, for example. For most southern European artists of the 17th century, however, drawing was a mere stage in the creation of a painting.

      Antoine Watteau (Watteau, Antoine), too, did drawings to “keep his hand in” for his painting, although he did so with an independence that led him far beyond the immediate occasion. Most figures in the paintings from various periods of his career were based on earlier drawings. In the grand scale of his form and the attention paid to pictorial elements, he carried on in the manner of Rubens, combining it with the light esprit of the 18th century. The leading position of French art in the first half of that century was confirmed by the achievements of Franƈois Boucher, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Hubert Robert, and Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, whose drawings include figure studies, genre-like works, and landscapes.

 In contrast to the French draftsmen who brought about a flowering of the à trois crayons method on tinted paper, some artists created similar landscapes with pen and brush but with greater objective abbreviation. Mention must here be made of Venice, with the Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista) family, whose expansively conceived pen drawings, washed with a broad brush, call forth the kind of luminaristic effect that Francesco Guardi (Guardi, Francesco) also used for landscape studies and imaginary scenes. These had been preceded by Canaletto's views of Venice, composed more severely as far as tectonic (constructional) detail is concerned but nonetheless the first examples of this form of the landscape capriccio, or fantasy. The architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Piranesi, Giovanni Battista) made his name primarily as a draftsman who recorded views of Rome; above all, in his drawings of architecture and eerie vaults (Carceri), he left behind a body of work of great intellectual and formal forcefulness.

      The Spanish painter Francisco de Goya (Goya, Francisco de), at the very end of the 18th and in the beginning of the 19th century, was in advance of his time in the way in which he handled his themes. Forming an odd contrast to the court-painter's pictures, his brush-and-sanguine drawings are rather more closely tied to his cycles of etchings. He combined the luminaristic effects of Tiepolo's drawings with the dramatic impact of a Rembrandt chiaroscuro.

      Also at the turn of the 19th century is an artist whose main work was that of a draftsman: the English caricaturist and social satirist Thomas Rowlandson (Rowlandson, Thomas), who produced colourful and distinctive watercolours. The late 18th and, even more, the early 19th century produced a drawing style that, in accordance with both the Neoclassical and the Romantic ideal (Romanticism), emphasized once more the linear element. In Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (Ingres, J.-A.-D), idealistic Neoclassicism found an exemplary expression of strict linearity, and the pencil drawing became a downright classical form. The Nazarenes and Romantics in Rome and the Alpine region (Joseph Anton Koch, the brothers Friedrich and Ferdinand Olivier, and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld) as well as those in north Germany (Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich (Friedrich, Caspar David)) were more lyrical but equally rigorous in the use of the hardpoint; after a long time, they were the first northern artists to have made a significant contribution to the history of drawing. Among 19th-century artists, the emphasis on delineation was characteristic also of Moritz von Schwind (Schwind, Moritz von) in Germany and John Millais (Millais, Sir John Everett, 1st Baronet) in England. (In the Neoclassical phase of the 20th century it was renewed, in a more open and “handwriting” fashion, by Thomas Eakins (Eakins, Thomas) in the United States as well as by Picasso, Matisse, and Amedeo Modigliani in France.) The drawings of Eugène Delacroix (Delacroix, Eugène), while preserving plastic qualities, show a broader stroke and are thus more pictorial. Honoré Daumier (Daumier, Honoré), active in all mediums primarily as a draftsman, utilized pictorial chiaroscuro effects in forcible statements of social criticism.

      France continued to be a leading centre of the art of drawing, a form that was given a very personal note in each case in the works of Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Cézanne. The line—the common point of departure for all of the above-mentioned artists—did not disappear until Georges Seurat's plane shading, done in the Pointillist manner.

Modern

  Except for a few stylistic currents such as Tachism (paintings consisting of irregular blobs of colour), drawing is represented in the work of practically all 20th-century artists; it is as international as modern art itself. As the other arts have become nonrepresentational, thus attaining autonomy and formal independence in relation to external reality, drawing is more than ever considered an autonomous work of art, independent of the other arts. Some schools and individual artists as well have concentrated on drawing and in very individualistic ways. The German Expressionists, for instance, developed especially emphatic forms of drawing with powerful delineation and forcible and hyperbolic formal description; notable examples are the works of Ernst Barlach, Käthe Kollwitz, Alfred Kubin, Ernest Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Max Beckmann, and George Grosz. In the artists' group Der Blaue Reiter (Blaue Reiter, Der) (The Blue Rider), Wassily Kandinsky (Kandinsky, Wassily) was foremost in laying the groundwork for a new evaluation of the nonrepresentational line. Paul Klee (Klee, Paul)'s lyrically sensitive drawings, carried out in a pen technique of unheard-of sublimity, represent a high point of modern drawing. In France, drawing plays a major role, especially in the work of the painters of the École de Paris (School of Paris), such as Pierre Soulages and Hans Hartung (Hartung, Hans), who consider the line, the framework of lines, and the network of lines, as primary manifestations of form. Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze) and also the English artist Graham Sutherland (Sutherland, Graham) may actually be called spiritual draftsmen who put their faith in the magic of the line. Finally, drawing occupies a considerable place in the work (including all its variants of style and form) of Pablo Picasso (Picasso, Pablo), who knew how to make use of its manifold technical possibilities. One is surely justified in calling him the greatest draftsman of the 20th century and one of the greatest in the history of drawing.

Heribert R. Hutter

Eastern

      Some form of monochromatic brush drawing with ink may have been practiced in China as early as the 2nd millennium BC; but the earliest pictorial work is in lacquer or on bronze vessels, contemporaneous with Alexander the Great (ruled 336–323 BC). It relies on contour and silhouette, with men and animals depicted in horizontal registers (levels, one above the other) reminiscent of Egyptian and Mediterranean work. The extent of any mutual influence between East and West cannot yet be determined. Under the Eastern Han dynasty (AD 25–220) wall paintings, linear in character, were produced in fresco (wet plaster) and secco (dry). Only in the Wei (386–534/35) and Tang (618–907) dynasties did the true character of Chinese drawing on silk or paper emerge. In the 7th century, the characteristic albums (ceye) of drawings appear.

      No distinction was made between drawing and painting because all Chinese pictorial art was fundamentally graphic. The artist worked with the fine point of the brush on paper or silk laid horizontally on a table. Work in pure outline was called baimiao; ink applied in splashes, pomo. Colour was used sparingly or not at all. The final work was not made direct from nature.

      Hindu and Buddhist paintings at Ajanta in India and also in Sri Lanka reveal the essential quality in all Indian art: emphasis on a flowing, rhythmic contour to express movement and gesture. Drawings on palm leaf of the 11th century are similarly based on the use of line to depict mythological scenes.

      The 14th century saw the manufacture of paper, introduced from China, permitting the production of the vertical book. Despite the Muslim prohibition of human representation, books illustrated with drawings, sometimes with flat decorative colour, were produced at the Persian and Mughal (Mughal painting) courts, but not for public display. The use of a precise and expressive line constituted the basis for Persian and Indian (both Mughal and Rajput) miniature paintings, which show people in landscape or in relation to buildings.

      Japanese art tended to follow that of China until the early 19th century, when the popular colour print was introduced. In the graceful feminine gestures of Utamaro's work, the Eastern love of flowing contour is manifest, his lines varying in width and density. Hokusai's drawings of social life in a humorous, almost grotesque vein reveal his complete command of the expressive line.

Ed.

Additional Reading

Joseph Meder, The Mastery of Drawing, trans. and rev. by Winslow Ames, 2 vol. (1978; originally published in German, 1919; 2nd ed., 1923), a voluminous work that remains the basic treatment of the history and techniques of drawing. Another treatment, more concise in every respect, is Heinrich Leporini, Die Künstlerzeichnung, 2nd ed. (1955). Arthur E. Popham published an introduction to drawing in A Handbook to the Drawings and Watercolours in the Department of Prints and Drawings of the British Museum (1939), based on the ample materials held by the British Museum. Walter Koschatzky, Die Kunst der Zeichung: Technik, Geschichte, Meisterwerke (1977), is a survey of the history, functions, and techniques of drawing, from the beginnings to modern art, based on excellent examples chosen mainly from the Graphische Sammlung Albertina in Vienna. Charles De Tolnay in History and Technique of Old Master Drawings (1943, reprinted 1972); and James Watrous in The Craft of Old-Master Drawings (1957), deal, from different points of view, with the history and techniques of the old masters; while Heribert Hutter in Drawing: History and Technique (1968; originally published in German, 1966), stresses the artistic function of drawing and includes modern works. Daniel M. Mendelowitz, Mendelowitz's Guide to Drawing, 3rd ed. rev. by Duane A. Wakeham (1982), provides a historical résumé, with reference to the artistic elements and technical means of drawing; in the supplement to the 1st ed., Drawing: A Study Guide (1967), he offers practical instructions for drawing techniques and their application; as does Robert Beverly Hale in Drawing Lessons from the Great Masters (1964, reprinted 1974). Jakob Rosenberg illustrates the possibilities of drawing in Great Draughtsmen from Pisanello to Picasso, rev. ed. (1974), with samples from the works of eight great artists. Great Drawings of All Time, ed. by Ira Moskowitz and Victoria Thorston, 5 vol. in 6 (1962–79), contains a summary with comments by leading authorities. M.W. Evans, Medieval Drawings (1969), is useful for the early history of the art of drawing; Paul J. Sachs, Modern Prints and Drawings: A Guide to a Better Understanding of Modern Draughtsmanship (1954), for more recent developments. Hermann Boekhoff and Fritz Winzer, Das grosse Buch der Graphik (1968), gives the history of the 24 best known collections, with comments by the various curators and the basic catalog of each collection. Interesting information can be found in catalogs of many exhibitions and collections, such as Bernice Rose, Drawing Now (1976), which discusses contemporary types of drawing. The number of detailed investigations in regard to individual countries, periods, and artists is too large to be listed in this bibliography. One that can be especially recommended, however, is Edward J. Olszewski, The Draftsman's Eye: Late Italian Renaissance Schools and Styles (1981). Luigi Grassi, Storia del disegno (1947), is very valuable for the role of drawing in the historical theories of art, including the elucidation of the original sources for further study. Unsurpassed in method and fundamental for an intensive study of this subtle theme is Bernhard Degenhart's essay “Zur Graphologie der Handzeichnung,” in Jahrbuch der Hertziana, vol. 1 (1937). Heribert R. Hutter

▪ yarn manufacturing

also called  Drafting,  

      in yarn manufacture, process of attenuating the loose assemblage of fibres called sliver (q.v.) by passing it through a series of rollers, thus straightening the individual fibres and making them more parallel. Each pair of rollers spins faster than the previous one.

      Drawing reduces a soft mass of fibre to a firm uniform strand of usable size. In the production of man-made fibres, drawing is a stretching process applied to fibres in the plastic state, increasing orientation and reducing size.

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