Studies for Various Subjects

Summary

A reproduction produced by the Vasari Society of a drawing from the French School. The drawing shows two seated figures in an area of garden to the left and a man standing towards the right. The seated figures are encased by a fence structure with wooden poles at four corners joined at the top by more poles which complete a square above head height. Joining two of the poles in the foreground and the background at floor level is a zigzag of low diagonal sticks. Within this structure a woman sits facing towards the right. She is wearing a thick cloak and is holding up a bunch of grapes with her left hand. Behind her another woman is kneeling, this time facing towards the right. This woman's hair flows down her back, and she too has a bunch of grapes in her hand. Both women are wearing circular hats on the top of their heads. The man to the right is wearing robes and had both his hands held up towards his chest as if holding something. He is looking towards the right. In the lower right of the composition is a two-line inscription. Nos. 12 and 14 are grouped together in the text from the accompanying booklet produced by the Vasari Society: "Nos. 12, 13 FRENCH SCHOOL (?) (About 1420) British Museum, 1895.9.15.589. (From the Thane, Lawrence, Woodburn, J. C. Robinson, and Malcolm Collections.) Pen and bistre. 17.3 x 16.7 cm. (6 3/4 x 6 1/2 in.) 12. Two subjects apparently disconnected, viz. a woman and a young girl within an open arbour or pergola, the one seated and the other kneeling, both busy with what look like bunches of grapes, of which the young girl is putting one away into a bag. To the right, outside the pergola, a standing figure of a long-bearded, heavily draped man, resembling an apostle or evangelist. At foot two hexameter lines: Hinc rerum vertigo oritur, sic leta dolendis Sors hominum alternat variatque volubilis orbem - apparently refering to a design of Fortune's wheel, which was presumably on part of the sheet which is now cut away. The handwriting of the couplet is pronounced by palaeographers to be French. 13. (On an irregularly shaped sheet pasted at the back of no. 12.) A figure of the Virgin kneeling, with reverted head, at a desk, in an attitude frequent in Flemish and Rhenish pictures of the Annunciation; and beside her a little in the rear, where the angel of the Annunciation would naturally be expected, the upper part of the figure of a man, apparently a king, holding out (not the Annunciation lily, but) a sceptre terminating in a fleur-de-lis. The faces of both figures have been defaced. The drawings, both on the front and the back sheets, are very attractive, especially the pergola scene on the front, and at the same time extremely puzzling. The colour of the ink is identical in both cases, and the management of the pen nearly so; hence it is probable, though not quite certain, that both sheets are made by one hand. The style is in neither case properly Italian, nor Flemish, nor French, and even the costumes in the pergola scene seem ambiguous. But on the whole the style of the drawings as well as the character of the handwriting seem to point to Northern France, Artois, or the nearest adjacent parts of Flanders. No one who has studied the sheet has yet been able to explain or find an analogy for the pergola scene. The king with the fleur-de-lis sceptre, on the reverse, should according to all analogy be St. Louis; but occurring on the same sheet with his patroness the Virgin, it is he and not she whom we should expect to find in the posture of prayer and reverence. ... S. C."