Two Male Nudes (1710): Art, History and Details

Two Male Nudes (1710) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Louis de Boullogne (French, 1654–1733).

The work and its context

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

Michelangelo’s masterful rendering of the male nude set the standard for many generations of artists studying in academies across Europe. Life drawings (made from nude models) became so essential to an artist’s training at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris (founded in 1648 by Louis XIV) that finished drawings like these were commonly called academies. Louis de Boullogne served as a professor of life drawing at the Royal Academy between 1694 and 1715. This work reflects the common practice of drawing from two models, which allowed artists to explore a narrative. Here the figures resemble a wounded warrior and his companion.

Object facts

• Title: Two Male Nudes
• Date: 1710
• Creator attribution: Louis de Boullogne (French, 1654–1733)
• Culture: France
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: black chalk, heightened with white chalk
• Dimensions: Overall: 58.4 x 41.9 cm (23 x 16 1/2 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2008.339

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.