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Adam and Eve helped establish Albrecht Dürer as one of the undisputed masters of engraving, even in his own day. Dürer's virtuosity is most evident in his use of line. Modeling the figures in light and shade, it varies from coarse, for tree trunks, to very fine, for shading on the legs. The print also exhibits Dürer's fascination with classical canons of beauty and proportion as well as minute descriptions of the natural world.

Adam and Eve are depicted in the moment before the Fall. Eve conceals one apple in her left hand and is about to accept another from Satan who appears in the guise of a snake. This predatory theme is echoed by the cat, tensely crouched to pounce on the mouse between Adam's feet. The parrot, symbol of wisdom, turns its gaze from the impending debacle.

Dürer represented this final moment of man's untarnished state with perfect human figures of mathematically determined proportions. Adam is posed like the Apollo Belvedere, the classical sculpture representing the male physical ideal, and Eve is modeled on classical prototypes of Venus.

Naturalism and whimsy carry the narrative to an audience well versed in symbol and imagery and accustomed to their visual interpretation. The cat, elk, rabbit, and ox represent man's four temperaments, or humors, elements found in harmony in the perfectly balanced soul: choler or anger, melancholy, the sanguine or sensuous, and phlegmatic or apathetic. In the distance a goat teetering on a precipice provides a symbolic image of Adam and Eve's final moment of precarious equilibrium.

The Lamentation alludes forcefully and economically to the Passion narrative. The site on Calvary is indicated only by three cross standards, the ladder, and the thieves' feet. In the foreground, spikes and a pot of unguent refer to Christ's crucifixion, deposition, and entombment. Christ's body echoes the pose of the crucifixion, and the mourners' postures convey their grief. Mary Magdalen's raised arms and tumultuous hair form an iconic gesture of despair; John weeps over Christ's mutilated hand. The Virgin and Christ are sharply foreshortened, displaying Baldung's mastery of perspective.

The subject of this drawing was well known in Italy and had a special meaning in Rosso Fiorentino's native Florence. Found in the Apocrypha, the story of the slaying of the Assyrian general Holofernes by the Israelite widow Judith is traditionally a parable of the triumph of humility and continence over pride and lust. In the late fifteenth century the Florentines placed Donatello's Judith and Holofernes in front of their town hall as a symbol of the qualities they hoped would keep them free from domination by enemies.

Rosso's interpretation of the event is unusual and enigmatic. The nudity of Judith, her servant, and the hapless general, for which there is scarcely precedent either in the story or its traditional depictions, is emphasized by Rosso's use of light and shadow. Judith's classical stance gives her an air of assured competence, allowing Rosso to convey her potent attractiveness in the modeling of her shapely thighs and fleshy lower abdomen. She holds Holofernes' head as effortlessly as she might a fan, her strong heroic arms and pubescent breasts modifying the statement of her sensual lower body.

According to the story Judith remained chaste not only here but for the rest of her life, but Rosso's Judith seems to partake of both virtue and sensuality. The sharp contrast of her youthfulness with the extremely aged woman also makes this work a parable of mortality. This multifaceted approach to religious subject matter is typical of early mannerist artists, who rebelled against the rational and universal ideals of the High Renaissance by interpreting iconic subjects in unconventional ways.

Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione is renowned as one of the master draftsmen of Italian baroque art. He perfected a classically ordered style like Nicholas Poussin's as well as a broad, fully baroque style in the manner of Peter Paul Rubens and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, artists whose works he knew. Castiglione also originated a distinctive type of drawing, with oil pigments on paper, in which he developed an expressive personal style. By the time Castiglione drew St. Mark, his highly individual approach made his drawings as satisfying as finished works, even though, as here, they might be studies for paintings.

Castiglione's treatment of Mark writing his Gospel displays the spiritual energy and emotional intensity valued in art of the Counter-Reformation. For example, Mark is viewed close up, the loosely brushed strokes conveying a message of faith in unambiguous physical terms. His rapt upward gaze and smile acknowledge divine inspiration and grace.

The articulation of Mark's head and torso depicts a man physically and spiritually supported by God's grace. In contrast, the lower portion of the composition seems vague. The lion often appears in medieval art as the symbolic transmitter of Mark's inspiration, but here its forceful form is subdued. Castiglione apparently changed the lion's position from near Mark's foremost knee to its present place at his side; the unresolved position of the paws reflects this choice. In its overall effect this vigorous work combines the spontaneity of drawing and the powerful forms of the baroque grand manner with Castiglione's singular interpretation of the ecstatic evangelist.

In 1655 Rembrandt finished the last of eight states of this etching of Christ's judgment. The first five states of the print include a milling crowd in the foreground below the central group. In the sixth state, Rembrandt burnished out this crowd, replacing it with two arches flanking the figure of a river god. As a result, the somber composition, seen here in the seventh state, is organized almost entirely by the prominent architecture separating and enclosing three major groups. The curious townsfolk (left and right) represent disorder; the officials and soldiers around Christ symbolize an abstract, implacable justice. Individual figures are confined to windows, as the carved figures of Justice and Prudence are confined to their niches.

Both this subject and its presentation in an architectural setting had long been popular in northern Europe. The shallow, stagelike composition, with its varied levels and central platform, provided Rembrandt the opportunity to depict a large crowd of people. They are clothed in the anachronistic combination of exotic and contemporary costume that appears frequently in his biblical compositions. The variety of poses and costumes tempers the powerful symmetry of the architecture.

A shadowy central arch frames the richly dressed Pilate, who points to Christ, physically powerless among his oppressors. Rembrandt's very human depiction of the Savior occurs often in his work. The public setting of the judgment connects the image to the contemporary European practice of sentencing convicted persons in the open, before crowds.

In 1754 the painter Hubert Robert traveled to Italy with the diplomatic mission of Count de Stainville, the French ambassador to Rome. For the next eleven years he studied, painted, and drew the decaying ruins of the monuments of classical antiquity. Robert was strongly influenced by Giovanni Battista Piranesi's architectural drawings and sometimes fanciful reconstructions of Roman buildings. Robert found a responsive audience among his contemporaries, who saw in his depictions of Rome's past grandeur a melancholy but noble perspective from which to contemplate their own mortality.

The artist returned to Paris in 1765 and put his fascination with picturesque ruins to good use. In addition to his career as a painter, he became a landscape designer and by the 1770s was in great demand to construct gardens in the newly fashionable naturalistic manner.

This drawing, done in the red chalk Robert favored, shows a fountain and stairs leading to a formal terrace. The figures establish the scale in this graceful and imaginative setting, where towering trees with arching branches replace the formal symmetry and stonework of traditional baroque gardens. Foliage of varying density is rendered in Robert's rapidly executed sawtooth line and characteristically vigorous and assured hand.

Robert was a forebear of later romantic artists who painted real and imaginary landscapes, and his work marks the progression of the genre from a relatively minor position in academic eighteenth-century art to one of the most important themes in French painting of the nineteenth century.

The Orient exercised a powerful appeal for Eugène Delacroix and many other romantic artists and writers. The sensuality of light-drenched color, dusky women, and exotic locales appealed to their taste for heightened sensory and emotional experiences. The painting salons of early to mid nineteenth-century France included subjects associated with the East, ranging from fabulous horses to violent men.

Delacroix's paintings are perhaps the most memorable of this exotic genre. When in 1826 he painted his ambitious Death of Sardanapalus, depicting the death of an Assyrian king, he had never traveled outside France. Five years later, however, Delacroix was invited to go to Morocco to record the principal events of a diplomatic mission. Led by Count Charles de Mornay, the group sailed to Tangiers and eventually traveled overland to Meknes. During four months abroad Delacroix filled sketchbooks with what he had witnessed, producing a body of material that he drew upon for the rest of his career. This was the sole journey he ever made to northern Africa.

Delacroix painted this watercolor upon his return to France, while temporarily detained in quarantine because of a cholera outbreak. He produced an album of eighteen watercolors as a memento of the expedition for de Mornay, of which this work is one. This scene of strolling players captures both the immediacy and exoticism of Morocco's customs.

James McNeill Whistler is best known for evocative and atmospheric landscapes and for the austere tonal portrait of his mother. Associated with the impressionists, Whistler developed a painting style verging on the abstract, and in many of his paintings the artist's fascination with the play of color and form overwhelms any representational literalness.

Whistler's prints reveal another side of his perception. This etched portrait of the French sculptor Charles Drouet is a telling study of artistic personality as well as a masterful record of appearance. Although Whistler has boldly simplified the body, he observes the details of facial structure and texture closely: the virile beard, the slightly careworn brow, the shadowed eyes.

Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, Whistler, the son of a civil engineer, enjoyed the benefits of private drawing instruction from his youth. This most distinguished of American painters as a young man endured a most undistinguished career as a military officer at West Point, but the experience was partly redeemed by his work there as a draftsman. Apparently Whistler later learned etching during a brief stint with the United States Coast Guard and Geodetic Survey in Washington, D.C. This extremely rare Drouet portrait, one of a very few impressions made before the plate was canceled, is a product of these early experiences: a masterfully drafted image, it is a fine example of the etcher's linear technique.

Although the product of academic training, Edgar Degas possessed a powerfully modernist outlook. He admired Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) and studied under one of his pupils. In his formative years Degas was a dedicated copyist of old masters. Later he exhibited with the impressionists, shared their aesthetic convictions, and was deeply committed to an art that conveyed imaginative truths rather than literal images.

After about 1870 Degas turned from portraiture and history to painting experiences of modern life. Along with many artists of the day, he realized that etching could preserve drawing's spontaneity even while making multiple original works. Living in an age when experimental method and intellectual achievement were synonymous, Degas became deeply involved in innovative printmaking techniques.

This rare print of actresses in their dressing cubicles preparing for a performance reveals the theater world Degas knew so well. Aquatint produces textures and tonalities that can be hand-burnished to change effect; this is how Degas achieved his washlike areas of light and shadow. He was fascinated by effects of interior lighting, which here casts a dramatic shadow to indicate the presence of a third woman. This shadow gives continuity to the receding spaces of the composition, indicated in four vertical panels. The women are linked by their experience of life in these dimly lit rooms, an experience Degas subtly conveyed in line and tone.

This remarkable and fresh watercolor typifies much of Winslow Homer's work and illustrates the contribution of the American school of landscape painters in the late nineteenth century. In contrast to earlier European treatments of nature, Homer's approach is direct, stripped of literary allusion and pretension.

Early in his career Homer visited Paris, something of a ritual journey for young nineteenth-century artists. The effect of his sojourn upon Homer's work was more subtle than upon that of his American contemporaries. The atmospheric effects he learned from the impressionists were tempered by his preference for naturalistic reportage of American subject matter, reinforced over time by the many years he spent as an illustrator for Harper's magazine.

Homer's subject here is a lake in upstate New York, where a hunter is hauling his dog into a boat. The man is probably an Adirondacks guide, a grizzled local figure Homer painted several times. Homer concentrates on a diamond-shaped composition defined laterally by the skiff and the hoofs of the slain deer, vertically by the man and the dog—a sportsman's perspective. His interest is in physical sensation and immediacy; one can almost feel the precarious equilibrium of the boat as the boy tensely crouches to counterbalance the weight of the soaking dog. Homer's subject is uniquely American and of the moment.

Purchase catalogues:
Masterpieces from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Master Drawings of Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Sb)
Los Angeles County Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections