Drawing Depicting The Head Of A Beautiful Woman, 18th-century French School

Black, red, and white chalk; irregularly incised oval with traces of black ink. 170 x 120 mm. (6.75 x 4.75 inches)

Parallels can be drawn between the beautiful, small drawing from the early 18th century shown here and the portraits of young women that François Boucher produced throughout his career, particularly in the 1750s and 1760s.

Rather than portraits drawn from life, these were often conceived as idealized types of feminine beauty, following the artistic tradition of drawing that traces back to the Florentine artists of the Renaissance.

Thanks to the use of red, black, and white chalks (“aux trois crayons”), these studies of women’s heads take on a new immediacy and intimacy. This is the case here, where individual features seem to have been set aside, serving simply to please the viewer’s eye… a true beauty indeed!