Drawing of the Month #16
Wednesday, 1 January 2025. Newsletter 16.
Allan Ramsay (1713-1784)
Studies of arms and drapery, c. 1740-46
Black and white chalk on blue paper, The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust)
Dr Rachel Hapoienu, Assistant Curator of Works on Paper at the Courtauld Gallery, London, has kindly chosen our sixteenth drawing of the month.
Study sheets like these are inherently more interesting to me than highly polished drawings, as they reveal the working process and a glimpse into the mind of their creator. The artist of this sheet, Allan Ramsay, was a Scotsman who moved to London in 1732/33 and found enormous success, becoming Principal Painter to King George III. There are over 600 paintings listed in Alastair Smart’s catalogue raisonné of the artist, so Ramsay clearly needed a large repertoire of poses and costumes to draw upon to meet this demand. Nevertheless, he stands out among his contemporaries for his devotion to drawing. The hands at left on this sheet were used in Ramsay’s portrait of Mrs Jane Madan, signed and dated 1746, formerly in a private collection and sold at auction in 2020. The basket in the drawing was replaced with long feathers in the painting. The torso at right may have been used in a number of female portraits, perhaps most likely that of Mrs Elizabeth Symonds, now in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.
Many of Ramsay's drawings, like this sheet, focus on hands and the position of the fingers, reminding us that, even for the most talented artists, hands are eminently challenging to depict. This sheet also aptly demonstrates why an artist would choose to use blue paper: it served as the ideal mid-tone to study the relationship between light and dark. The white chalk is used to brilliant effect here, exploring the reflection of light on bare skin and on luxurious fabrics that likely would have been costly and shiny. This use of white media would be much less successful on white paper, and so Ramsay elected to use black and white chalk studies on blue paper more than 100 times in preparatory studies for his paintings.
Compared to other blue paper drawings in our collection, this sheet is noticeably darker in hue. Blue paper is typically ‘variegated’ – formed of coloured fibres derived from broken-down rags. There are not only blue fibres in the mix, but white, brown, beige or red, producing a shade of blue that varies between each vat of paper pulp. When I put this drawing under our microscope, I was surprised to see very little variety in the paper fibres inherent in this sheet, which is instead formed of a high proportion of blue fibres mixed with purely white fibres. This explains its deeper blue tone compared to typical blue paper. Many of Ramsay’s blue paper drawings are similarly dark, and so he must have deliberately chosen a particular paper stock to more effectively complement his use of white highlights. This is a potent reminder that for draughtsmen, paper is not just a neutral background, but integral to their working process.
This drawing is currently on display at the Courtauld Gallery until 26 January 2025 in Drawn to Blue: artists’ use of blue paper.
