Leon Joseph-Florentine Bonnat, “Study for Jacob Wrestling with the Angel”, 1876, Pencil and Black Chalk on Paper, 14 x 20 Inches, Dahesh Museum of Art, New York

This is either a highly finished study for, or a variant after, a painting that Bonnat exhibited at the Salon in 1876, current location unknown. With its emphasis on tensed musculature and the interaction of anatomical forms, this work illustrates perfectly how integral the numerous life drawings of nude male models were to an artist’s formation of fully realized narrative compositions.

As an artist and a teacher, Bonnat was adamant in the fundamental importance of skillful drawing. In a letter translated and published in The American Magazine of Art in 1916, Bonnat declared: “Drawing and form: from those foundations we never stray; we cannot, we ought not to, because they are the conditions absolutely requisite to eternal beauty; and from antique art to contemporary, in passing through all the great epochs…it is by form and drawing alone that the world has been enriched with so many masterpieces.”