French Drawings

March 1, 2009 9:39 PM

The Essence of Line is a collection of over 900 drawings by French artists "from Ingres to Degas" by the Baltimore Museum of Art. I'd link to some highlights but the site did such a stellar job of it that I'll just direct you there. They also have some sketchbooks. Note that some of the drawings have short essays about them. As a related link, here is the famous Demonographia, with drawings of demons by Louis Breton and descriptions by Collin de Plancy.
posted by Kattullus (7 comments total)

Oh, and sometimes the "magnify" option doesn't give one the full size but right-clicking and viewing the image by itself does the trick.
posted by Kattullus at 9:40 PM on March 1, 2009

Wow these are great. Makes me want to revisit Baltimore, almost.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 5:01 AM on March 2, 2009

Thanks for this. I've known of the drawings for a while and they were definitely worth revisiting.

But I didn't know about the de Plancy pdf (thanks!). Cornell University's The Fantastic in Art and Fiction site has a sampling of the illustrations from 'Dictionnaire Infernal' (Demonographia) at high resolution.
posted by peacay at 5:44 AM on March 2, 2009 [1 favorite]

Thanks for the high resolution images, peacay! I was getting tired of my current desktop background (John Calvin's deathbed) and these should do nicely.
posted by Kattullus at 7:16 AM on March 2, 2009

aww those demons are kyoooot.
posted by sidr at 8:38 AM on March 2, 2009

For the dead tree version, the publisher I work for published the catalog for this show. You can read the foreword to the book here. It really is an extraordinary group of drawings that these two institutions have collected. And right there in Bal'mer, hon.
posted by Toekneesan at 1:54 PM on March 2, 2009

Superb site and, as usual, wonderful post. Thanks Kattullus.
posted by nickyskye at 4:30 PM on March 2, 2009