Equally far removed from any claim to artistic standing are most illustrations serving scientific purposes, the aim of which is to record as objectively as possible the characteristic and typical features of a given phenomenon. The systematic drawings, used especially in the natural sciences to explain a system or a function, resemble plans; descriptive and naturalistic illustrations, on the other hand, approach the illusionistic plausibility of visual experience and can attain an essentially artistic character. A good many artists have drawn scientific illustrations, and their works—the botanical and zoological drawings of the Swiss Merian family in the 17th and 18th centuries, for example—are today more esteemed for their artistic than for their documentary value.
Of a similarly ambivalent nature is the illustrative drawing that perhaps does not go beyond a simple pictorial rendition of a literary description but because of its specific formal execution may still satisfy the highest artistic demands. Great artists have again and again illustrated Bibles, prayer books, novels, and literature of all kinds. Some of the famous examples are Botticelli’s illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy and Dürer’s marginal illustrations for the emperor Maximilian’s prayer book. Some artists have distinguished themselves more as illustrators than as autonomous draftsmen, as for example the 18th-century German engraver Daniel Chodowiecki, the 19th-century caricaturist Honoré Daumier, the 19th-century satiric artist Wilhelm Busch, and the 20th-century Austrian illustrator Alfred Kubin.
Clearly connected with illustrative drawing is caricature, which, by formally overemphasizing the characteristic traits of a person or situation, creates a suggestive picture that—precisely because of its distortion—engraves itself on the viewer’s mind. This special kind of drawing was done by such great artists as Leonardo, Dürer, and the 17th-century artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini and by draftsmen who, often for purposes of social criticism, have devoted themselves wholly to caricaturing, such as the 18th-century Italian Pier Leone Ghezzi, the 19th-century Frenchman Grandville (professional name of Jean-Ignace-Isidore Gérard), the 19th-century American political cartoonist Thomas Nast, and the 20th-century American Al Hirschfeld.
“The Man with the (Carpet) Bags”; cartoon by Thomas Nast, 1872, depicting the Southern attitude toward Northerners during ReconstructionThe Granger Collection, New York
From such overdrawn types developed continuous picture stories that could dispense to a considerable extent with the explanatory text. Modern cartoons are based on these picture stories. Through the formally identical treatment of peculiar types, these drawings acquire an element of consecutiveness that, by telling a continuing story, adds a temporal dimension to two-dimensional drawing. This element is strongest in trick drawings that fix on paper, in brief segments of movement, invented creatures and phenomena that lack all logical plausibility; a rapid sequence of images (leafing through the pages, seeing it projected on the screen) turns the whole into apparent motion, the fundamental process of animation. The artistic achievement, if any, lies in the original invention; its actual realization is predetermined and sometimes carried out by a large and specialized staff of collaborators, often with the aid of stencils and traced designs. Moreover, since the final result is partially determined by the mechanical multiplication, an essential criterion of drawing—the unity of work and result—does not apply. Subject matter of drawing
Anything in the visible or imagined universe may be the theme of a drawing. In practice, however, by far the greatest number of art drawings in the Western world deal with the human figure. This situation springs from the close bond between drawing and painting: in sketches, studies, and compositions, drawing prepared the way for painting by providing preliminary clarification and some formal predetermination of the artist’s concept of a given work. Many drawings now highly regarded as independent works were originally “bound,” or “latent,” in that they served the ends of painting or sculpture. Yet, so rounded, self-contained, and aesthetically satisfying are these drawings that their erstwhile role as handmaidens to the other pictorial arts can be reconstructed only from knowledge of the completed work, not from the drawing itself. This situation is especially true of a pictorial theme that acquired, at a relatively early stage, an autonomous rank in drawing itself: the portrait. Portraits
Drawn 15th-century portraits—by Pisanello or Jan van Eyck, for example—may be considered completed pictorial works in their concentration, execution, and distribution of space. The clear, delicately delineated representation follows every detail of the surface, striving for realism. The profile, rich in detail, is preferred; resembling relief, it is akin to the medallion. Next in prominence to the pure profile, the three-quarter profile, with its more spatial effect, came to the fore, to remain for centuries the classic portrait stance.
The close relationship to painting applies to practically all portrait drawings of the 15th century. Even so forceful a work as Dürer’s drawing of the emperor Maximilian originated as a portrait study for a painting. At the same time, however, some of Dürer’s portrait drawings clearly embody the final stage of an artistic enterprise, an ambivalence that can also be observed in other 16th-century portraitists. The works of Jean and François Clouet in France and of the younger Hans Holbein in Switzerland and even more markedly in England in the same century bestowed an autonomy on portrait drawing, especially when a drawing was completed in chalk of various colours. The choice of the softer medium, the contouring, which for all its exactitude is less severely self-contained, and the more delicate interior drawing with plane elements gives these drawings a livelier, more personal character and accentuates once more their proximity to painting.
In polychromatic chalk technique and pastel, portrait drawing maintained its independence into the 19th century. In the 18th century, Quentin de La Tour, François Boucher, and Jean-Baptiste Chardin—all of these artists from France—were among its chief practitioners, and even Ingres, living in the 19th century, still used its technique. In pastel painting, the portrait outweighed all other subjects.
In the choice of pose, type, and execution, portrait painting, like other art forms, is influenced by the general stylistic features of an epoch. Thus, the extreme pictorial attitude of the late Baroque and Rococo was followed by a severer conception during Neoclassicism, which preferred monochrome techniques and cultivated as well the special form of the silhouette, a profile contour drawing with the area filled in in black. Unmistakably indebted to their 15th-century predecessors, the creators of portrait drawings of the early 19th century aimed once more at the exact rendition of detail and plastic effects gained through the most carefully chosen graphic mediums: the thin, hard pencil was their favourite instrument, and the silverpoint, too, was rediscovered by the Romantics.
More interested in the psychological aspects of portraiture, late 19th- and 20th-century draftsmen preferred the softer crayons that readily follow every artistic impulse. The seizing of characteristic elements and an adequate plane rendition weighed more heavily with them than realistic detail. Mood elements, intellectual tension, and personal engagement are typical features of the modern portrait and thus also of modern portrait drawing, an art that continues to document the artist’s personal craftsmanship beyond the characteristics of various techniques. Landscapes