Francois louis joseph watteau the improbability

Drawing Time* EWA LAJER-BURCHARTH Four kvinna heads—and a phantom of a profil lurking underneath its fully fleshed utgåva in the lower right—emerge from the void of the page. The drawing, Five Studies of a Woman’s Head, now in the British Museum, was produced in a single sitting with the model assuming different poses while the artist drew her. He, too, must have changed his position in order to cast a precipitously downward glance at his model’s head, as the two radically foreshortened views of it at the top of the page, and three similar, if less abbreviated, ones on another sheet executed during the same posing session, suggest.1 Notwithstanding the specificity of the model’s poses, the drawings are not faithful records of a sitting, nor do they strictly correspond to its time span, as the two different hats worn bygd the model in the lower lista of the second drawing—implying the woman took a short break in beställning to change—indicate. They are, rather, deliberate

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