This academic study, with its smudged pencil, slight heightening in white chalk, and blue-toned paper is clearly the work of a tradition-conscious, academically schooled artist faithful to the Renaissance Florentine tradition that quickly spread throughout Europe. The artist focused primarily on the clothing, the depiction of which was fundamental to the study of drawing from life. Thus, the cloak is especially convincing in its softness, while the hand, probably with an extended index finger, is barely sketched in with a few light strokes.
Joaquín María Cortés studied at the Real Escuela de las Tres Nobles Artes in Seville sponsored by Francisco de Bruna. In 1771, under the patronage of Charles III, that institution revived the tradition of the Academia de Dibjujo founded by Francisco de Herrera the Younger and others in 1660. From 1802 to 1810, Cortés was himself a professor of painting at the Real Escuela and later became its general director.[1] As a teacher he was responsible for the students "basic instruction in drawing heads and figures after plaster models and from life.”[2] He was moreover highly esteemed as a Murillo copyist. In Echeverría's inventory, the sheet is listed under position 12, no. 2: “By D. Joaquín Cortés, native of Seville, Director of its Academy and Honorary Chamber painter)." A Male Nude Sitting with his Back to the Viewer in the collection of the Real Escuela de las Tres Nobles Artes is signed on the front by Cortés and very closely resembles the present drawing in the position of the head and the treament of the hair.

Jens Hoffmann-Samland


1 Banda y Vargas 1982, 9.
2 "La Real Escuela se mantuvo durante la ocupación francesa y ... reafirmó su personalidad bajo la dirección de Joaquín María Cortés, el notable pintor († 1835) copista de Murillo, que tenía a su cargo las enseñanzas de principios, cabezas y figuras, dibujo del veso y del natural, es decir, toda la serie tradicional de la enseñanza del dibujo repetidamente comentada. Pérez Sánchez (dir.) 1995, 48.

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