113308

Academic work

Study of a Male Nude 1891

Head and shoulders to the right and looking down

Oil on canvas, 44 x 37 cm (17 ⅓ x 14 ½  in.)

Inscribed lower left: László F. / Paris 1891 v.

Private Collection

In October 1890 de László began his studies at the Académie Julian in Paris. On the strength of his depictions of peasant life, painted in Ó-Becse that summer, he was immediately accepted into Professor Jules Joseph Lefebvre’s (1836-1911) life painting class.

This is one of a number of figure studies he completed during his time there, which he described in his autobiography Portrait of a Painter (1939): “The Académie Julian was an old building, in the pre-Revolutionary style: square and sombre, without any artistic or architectural beauty – and a great lack of cleanliness… In the studio we were given six mornings to make studies of a given size. I think this was an excellent idea. The student was obliged to see and to understand the whole body, not only from the point of view of character or colour, but of movement also… It is vital that the student should understand the following principles: first to know the construction of everything in nature; only then is it possible for him, if he have a real vocation for art, to reduce what he sees to its relative importance, and to create, either in drawing or in painting, the expression of movement and colour values which is the spiritual part of art. All this I began to realise for the first time during my student days in Paris.”^[1]

PROVENANCE:

Róza Laub, sister of the sitter;

By descent

LITERATURE:
•Rutter, Owen, Portrait of a Painter, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1939, p. 66-68

KF 2020