Design for a Monumental Vase

Augustin Pajou · 1778

Medium

Pen, brush and brown and black ink, brush and brown wash, with traces of black chalk, heightened with white gouache, over graphite, on buff laid paper, laid down on cream laid card

Original size

32.8 × 19.8 cm (12 15/16 × 7 13/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Rococo

*Design for a Monumental Vase* captures the refined ambition of late eighteenth-century French decorative art — a single sheet that conjures an object of considerable grandeur through the most delicate of means. Augustin Pajou was primarily a sculptor, a favourite of the French court who decorated the Opéra at Versailles and produced celebrated portrait busts of Louis XV's inner circle. That sculptural instinct runs through every line of this design. Working in pen and brush with brown and black ink over graphite, and lifting the form with white gouache on buff laid paper, Pajou coaxes the illusion of weight and volume from a flat surface — the same problem he solved daily in marble and bronze, here translated into draughtsmanship. The drawing dates to 1778, when Pajou was at the height of his royal favour, deep in a decade of commissions that would define French Neoclassicism before the Revolution swept it away. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates this intricate interplay of tone and line into the warmth of paint on canvas, preserving the luminous contrast between the pale highlighted passages and the rich amber-brown shadows that give the original its sculptural presence.