The Fortnightly Flag #06 Leonardo to Rembrandt

The Fortnightly Flag  All about Art
12th September 2017



Rembrandt's Lion

I was walking home one day past Habitat's showroom. The floor to ceiling glass shop-front was plastered with jazzy posters by modern artists in bright garish colours which interested me not at all. My eye was caught by a small print 8" x 6" of a chalk sketch of a lion. It stopped me in my tracks. I just had to go over and take a closer look.

When I looked at it closely I had to laugh. It was by Rembrandt. The other artists were all pretty good artists but when you can stop someone dead in the street you have really got 'it' whatever 'it' actually is.

I am reminded of this because I have just been to the National Portrait Gallery's new exhibition "The Encounter: From Leonardo to Rembrandt" #The Encounter  npg.org.uk/encounter

The title is a bit of a tease because the collection only includes two sketches by Rembrandt and Leonardo, one apiece, neither of which is particularly remarkable. Tehran's contribution is a page of small doodles, quite superior doodles to be fair but doodles nonetheless in no particular context, while Leonardo's sketch is a small male nude which is just an exercise in proportion. I wouldn't go just to see them.

However the rest of the exhibition is a good collection of drawings by other Renaissance masters, the theme being the relationship between the artist and the sitter so most of the sketches are preparatory drawings for portraits.

From an English perspective the collection of drawings by Hans Holbein the Younger of subjects from the Tudor court are fascinating.

Artists need two things - inspiration and technique and, as usual, I wanted to study the latter. The artists use Silverpoint (a silver point on prepared paper - we now use pencil because it's cheaper), black, red and white chalk and sometimes all three, pen and ink, and chalk with a colourwash to give more depth or to highlight a feature like a red cap.

I can't show you any of the Masters because photography is forbidden in the exhibition but to demonstrate how important classical drawing techniques are to modern artists here are a couple of my sketches which use them.

The Head of a Woman uses the colourwash technique but by way of a modern twist I added the colour digitally. The original drawing is just pencil on paper.

The discus thrower, from a statue in the British Museum, is charcoal, red chalk and pencil on paper which makes the sketch a bit more dramatic.

And all because I could not walk past Rembrandt's Lion.