French Artists in Rome: An Examination of Eighteenth-Century Drawing Album

This dissertation examines the sketchbooks and albums made by French prix de Rome winners in Italy during the final decades of the eighteenth century. Although drawing had always been fundamental to the pedagogical program of the Academie royale de peintre et de sculpture, it became a particular site of exploration and formal experimentation in the sketchbooks made by Jacques Louis David and the circle of French artists that gravitated toward him, especially in the numerous architectural vignettes made en plein air by David and his favorite student Jean-Germain Drouais while traversing the Roman Campgana. Interactions between painters, architects and sculptors of diverse European nationalities were characteristic of the Roman sojourn. As a result, contemporaneous architectural theories put forth by such writers and antiquarians as Quatremere de Quincy authorized a radically formalized conception of the ways in which non-representational elements could be linked to the ideal beauty of the antique, untethered from subject matter, but still able to communicate the most elevated of concepts. It was therefore through the formal explorations of the architectural vignette that David and Drouais developed the conceptual apparatus for a neoclassicism that increasingly communicated through simplified formal relationships rather than relying on subject matter and imitation. This dissertation suggests that there took place a confluence of circumstances in Rome, including the increasing autonomy of artists from the Academie, whereby the space opened to them for formal experimentation in their plein air architectural drawings of the Campagne, alongside the need to collect the figures of antiquity as individual signifiers for use in a career back in Paris. As a result, the sketchbooks of French artists functioned as a site of experimentation unbound from academic stricture and instrumental in the developing conception of the artist as individual genius.