Unknown Maker, French

The twisting form of the rower in these sketches reveals Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s working process of using a model to study the body in motion. While living in Rome in the 1850s, Carpeaux admired Baroque sculpture and invested his own paintings, sculptures, and drawings with similar energy and dynamism. This model is neither languid nor frozen, and Carpeaux sketches his activity at different stages and from multiple angles to develop a three-dimensional understanding of human musculature at work. He may have intended this rower to appear in an unrealized painting of Charon’s Boat Crossing the Styx.