Male Academy with Wings (1745–50): Art, History and Details

Male Academy with Wings (1745–50) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is François Boucher (French, 1703–1770).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Academically trained artists often practiced drawing live models. Called academies, these figure studies occasionally served as preparatory drawings for paintings. Some artists crafted their academies to appeal to collectors interested in contemplating technical skill and inventiveness. Boucher may have imaginatively given wings to this male nude, who does not appear in any known painting, to demonstrate his ingenuity by transforming the model into a mythological figure.

Object facts

• Title: Male Academy with Wings
• Date: 1745–50
• Creator attribution: François Boucher (French, 1703–1770)
• Culture: France
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: red chalk on cream laid paper
• Dimensions: Overall: 30.1 x 37.1 cm (11 7/8 x 14 5/8 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2008.350

Collection credit

Bequest of Muriel Butkin

Further reading listed by the museum

• Foster, Carter E. "Jean-Bernard Restout's "sleep: Figure Study": Painting and Drawing from Life at the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture." Cleveland Studies in the History of Art 3 (1998): 48-85.
• Foster, Carter E., Sylvain Bellenger, and Patrick Shaw Cable. French Master Drawings from the Collection of Muriel Butkin. [Cleveland, Ohio]: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2001.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.