Human Figure

Human Figure is a subject in art. The gallery holds 200 works in this subject in art, including works by Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, Alfred Sisley and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

The human figure is the oldest and most persistent subject in Western art, and the nude—the unclothed body studied for its own expressive and formal power—stands at its core. The tradition crystallised in Ancient Greece. Around 600 BCE the first monumental statues, the rigidly frontal, symmetrical male *kouroi*, were carved with the left leg advanced and arms held to the sides. Within a century Greek sculptors abandoned this fixed template for the study of the body as it actually moves and rests. The breakthrough was *contrapposto*, which appeared in the early 5th century BCE and let the figure express weight, balance, and inner disposition. Polykleitos codified the new ideal in his *Doryphoros* (Spear-Bearer) and an accompanying treatise, the *Canon*, that set down the perfect proportions of the male body.

After a semi-dormant period in the Middle Ages, when Christian culture largely suppressed the naked body, the figure returned to a central position with the Renaissance. Reviving classical proportion and the systematic study of anatomy, Italian masters dissected cadavers to understand the body from within. Leonardo da Vinci distilled this fusion of art and science in the *Vitruvian Man* (c. 1487), inscribing a nude in circle and square after the Roman architect Vitruvius, while Michelangelo built an entire heroic vocabulary—the *David*, the Sistine ceiling—on the muscular male nude.

From the seventeenth century onward the figure was the foundation of academic training, where drawing from the live model and the idealised nude were the measure of an artist's skill. That authority was deliberately shattered in the modern era. Édouard Manet's *Olympia* (1863) replaced the mythological excuse with a frank contemporary woman returning the viewer's gaze, and Pablo Picasso's *Les Demoiselles d'Avignon* (1907) dismantled anatomy, perspective, and scale altogether, fracturing the figure into angular planes and opening the way to Cubism.

The human figure thus runs as a continuous thread—from Greek marble through Renaissance fresco to modernist rupture—against which landscape, still life, and abstraction define themselves. Even in collections weighted toward landscape, such as the river scenes of Corot, van Goyen, and Aert van der Neer or Bingham's *Fur Traders Descending the Missouri*, the human presence remains the element that gives scale, narrative, and meaning to the wider world.