Charles Bargue was a French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 artist

Artist

An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...

, a lithographer as well as a painter, who devised a drawing course.

Life and career

Charles Bargue is mostly remembered for his Cours de dessin, one of the most influential classical drawing courses conceived in collaboration with Jean-Léon Gérôme

Jean-Léon Gérôme

Jean-Léon Gérôme was a French painter and sculptor in the style now known as Academicism. The range of his oeuvre included historical painting, Greek mythology, Orientalism, portraits and other subjects, bringing the Academic painting tradition to an artistic climax.-Life:Jean-Léon Gérôme was born...

. The course, published between 1866 and 1871 by Goupil & Cie

Goupil & Cie

Goupil & Cie was a leading art dealership in 19th century France, with headquarters in Paris. Step by step, Goupil established a worldwide trade with reproductions of paintings and sculptures, with a network of branches in London, Brussels, The Hague, Berlin and Vienna, as well as in New York and...

, and composed of 197 lithographs printed as individual sheets, was to guide students from plaster casts to the study of great master drawings and finally to drawing from the living model.

Among the artists whose work is based on the study of Bargue's platework, is Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh

Vincent Willem van Gogh , and used Brabant dialect in his writing; it is therefore likely that he himself pronounced his name with a Brabant accent: , with a voiced V and palatalized G and gh. In France, where much of his work was produced, it is...

 who copied the complete set in 1880/1881, and (at least a part of it) again in 1890.

Although some sources suggest that Bargue was a student of Gerome, there is room for doubt. Bargue worked closely with Gérôme and was influenced by his style, which included Orientalist scenes and historical genre. Bargue's last painting was completed by Gérôme and is now conserved in the Malden Public Library, Malden MA, USA.

External links

• Artencyclopedia.com page on Bargue
• The art of drawing: Dahesh Museum of Art : exhibition
• Goupil Museum http://www.culture.gouv.fr/GOUPIL/FILES/