What are Bargue Plates?

0:00 [Music] we're going to start now by talking about an introduction of how to start working from the barg book the bark book is a series of lithographs created by charles bargh b-a-r-g-u-e barg is how it's pronounced and he worked in collaboration with his teacher who was the painter jean-leon jerome and jerome was a very well known successful painter in the late 19th century and a very very popular teacher and together they created this series of plates charles bark was the son of a lithographer and has already reached a high level of ability in his skills as a lithographer and when he became jerome's student they

0:47 they decided to work together to create this series of plates these plates are representative of the standard of art education how to teach people how to draw in the 19th century and so they are working they're creating drawings from casts of antique greek and roman sculpture and a little some more modern sculpture through the 19th century but you can recognize here the belvedere torso and so what we are starting to look at is an expert's classical drawings of the tradition of greek and roman sculpture from the past and so this was a process that was the method for learning for teaching people how to draw and how to become proficient

1:33 draftsman and also to teach people taste and understanding of human form from the renaissance all the way up through the 19th century now in the renaissance artists would become apprentice to a painter and the painter would do drawings for his students to copy and this was called working from the flat and eventually when the student was ready they would work from the actual three-dimensional sculpture and that was called working from the round today we call that cast drawing and cast painting and this is working from plates sometimes we call it working from the flat as well so for hundreds and hundreds of years as our education developed and became more systematized and formalized and nobody was more systematic or formal than the french

2:19 in uh the late by the mid 19th century there was a real need for standardized plates plates that were accepted by the culture as being the best models models for students to work from so this series of plates are considered extremely high quality really the best quality plates from the late 19th century and you can see they really show step one and step two for how to create a drawing how to break everything down into very simple shapes and then how to have a more complex contour or outline and how to do some shading to make it look three-dimensional most art students would work from these plates for probably a year and then they would move on to cast drawing for a year working from three-dimensional round casts and then

3:06 finally they would move to drawing the human figure once they had finished several years of study working through the plates through the cast and drawing the human figure they were then ready to go an apprentice with a painter and to learn painting so in art school they mainly studied drawing for three or four years at least and you can see every single plate is step one step two