At the height of his career, illustrator Robert Fawcett continued to practice drawing from the model every week.
He’d have a model come to his studio and at the end of every session he’d lift the lid on the model platform and toss in his drawings for the day. When he died, there were hundreds and hundreds of life drawings which his widow handed out to his friends and admirers.
This is a life drawing from Fawcett’s days as a teenage student at the Slade School in London, complete with comments from his instructor.
Here is a sampling of drawings from Fawcett’s model platform:
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Fawcett’s familiarity with the human form helped him block out figures in preliminary layouts for illustrations:
While a student at the Slade School, Fawcett used to complain bitterly about their incessant focus on drawing from the model. Thirty years later, at the top of his profession, he saw new value in the process.
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Post script: Fawcett had disdain for artists who spent their time “noodling and polishing simple figure studies.” He said that such studies “might now be blinding in their degree of finish, dazzling in their virtuosity, but we ourselves would be neatly trapped in that comfortable corner from which so many students fail to find the exit.” The following two studies (one version in charcoal, the other in ink) were done for propaedeutic purposes but the third study, more purposeful and strong, seemed closer to Fawcett’s natural preferences.
