In recent weeks, we’ve looked at different approaches to figure drawing, and discussed how different artists can use the same human form as a vehicle for wrestling with very different types of issues of both form and content.
In earlier days when illustrators were classically trained in anatomy, figure drawing seems to have been a far more literal educational process. Here are some figure studies by illustrator E. F. Ward who was in George Bridgman’s anatomy class (along with Norman Rockwell.)
The class sometimes drew figures in costume:
There has been a great deal of talk about artists revealing subliminal truth and the narrative fallacy in theor life drawing, but fromwhat I’ve read, Bridgman would have no patience or sympathy for such theories. He expected that the purpose of these studies was to learn anatomy.
