1918
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Studies of a Male Nude (verso) is a 1918 by John Singer Sargent, depicting Clothed Male, Naked Female, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a quick, loose sketch of a man’s back and shoulders, muscles faintly outlined in pencil or charcoal. This isn’t just a figure study—it’s a prep drawing for Sargent’s war painting *Gassed*. The soldier in the sketch later appears in the big canvas, bent over, bandaged, part of a line of wounded men. The fast lines show Sargent working out how light would hit the body before he painted it. Look up *chiaroscuro* to see how artists use light and shadow to shape figures like this.
In 1919, Sargent exhibited a large painting at the Royal Academy of Art in London called Gassed. The Dressing Station at Le Bac and on the Doullers-Arras Road. The British War Memorial Committee had commissioned the work from him as a way of honoring the sacrifices of World War I. The subject was based on a scene the artist actually witnessed during his visit to battlefields in France in 1918. This drawing is a study for one of the soldiers in the painting, which now hangs in the Imperial War Museum in London.
Read the full account in the museum source.
John Singer Sargent (; January 12, 1856 – April 15, 1925) was an American expatriate artist, considered the "leading portrait painter of his generation" for his evocations of Belle Époque and Edwardian-era luxury.
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