This accomplished and captivating study of a life model by Thomas Stothard was almost certainly drawn during his time as a student at the Royal Academy Schools (1777-c.1783). [1] Such a date is supported by an analysis of the materials, technique and handling, along with comparisons with the artist’s later life drawings and documented working methods. Additional characteristics - such as the size and type of paper and the model's pose - further contribute to establishing the artwork’s date. [2] According to the artist’s son, Robert Thomas Stothard, his father ‘had rarely recourse to the living model’ after he ‘had ceased studying in the Royal Academy.’ [3] Primarily a designer of book illustrations, Thomas Stothard regarded the use of a life model as less essential to his professional work than it was for many of his contemporaries. When his son enrolled as a student at the Royal Academy in the early 1820s, Stothard offered him this advice: ‘nothing will come of nothing and what you study now will be so impressed upon your mind as to be capable of being delineated at pleasure.’ [4]

After being elected a Royal Academician in 1794, Stothard took an active role as a Visitor at the Academy of the Living Model, [5] a position he held throughout much of the remainder of his career. [6] Extant life drawings [7] made in the company of his students are almost entirely drawn on small sheets of paper, often in graphite or pen and ink, and were described by two different Academy pupils as ‘very clever spirited sketches of the model in pen and ink, seen from different points of view’ [8] and ‘slight and small sketches.’ [9] Anna Bray, his daughter-in-law and earliest biographer, described this method of study as a practice ‘peculiarly his own...He would place himself opposite [the model], and in a small sketch-book would make a careful outline in pen and ink, about five inches in height. He said that...this method...obliged him well to consider the lines and proportions before they were drawn, and that thus they became strongly impressed upon the memory. He...maintained that an eye and a hand well trained in making pen and ink outlines would be characterised by truth, carefulness, and a good flow of line; in short, would be masterly...Having in less than an hour's time thus taken one view of the figure before him, he would change his position so as to command a different view of it; and then, being especially careful to mark the change of contour in his subject, he would begin another sketch, and thus continue to work till he produced seven or eight drawings of the same figure.’ [10]

The reclining male model in the present drawing, many of whom were ‘soldiers, athletes or boxers on account of their physiques,’ [11] has been set in the traditional attitude of the dead Christ and ‘demonstrates the manner in which living models were posed at the Royal Academy to resemble figures taken from the Old Masters, [12] as well as from antique statuary.’ [13] In The Artist's Model: its Role in British Art from Lely to Etty, Bignamini and Postle argue that ‘the use of red chalk for life-drawings in England was probably far more common than has hitherto been recognised.’ [14] The prominence of red chalk in the continental academies helps explain why its already limited use declined even further in British life schools towards the end of the eighteenth century. [15] Nonetheless, several red chalk life studies created in Britain during the second half of the 18th century still survive today, including works by Giovanni Battista Cipriani, Francesco Bartolozzi, George Michael Moser, Allan Ramsay, William Parry, John James Masquerier, Alexander Runciman, William Woollett, Richard Dalton, Hugh Barron, and Lewis Pingo. This early drawing by Stothard stands as a rare and informative document of academic training in late eighteenth-century Britain, illuminating the formative processes that shaped Stothard’s later artistic method.

‘I can show you a sketch of his from the life school, [16] so true to nature, and so free from labour, as to prove the truth of his having himself taken in that which he could, as he recommended me, bring out at pleasure.’  [17]