Standing Figure in a Niche and Studies for the Ugolino Group (recto); Red-Robed Prelate in a Crowd (verso)

Jean Baptiste Carpeaux · 1857/58

Medium

Pen and black ink, with touches of pink gouache (recto), and pen and black ink with brush and gray wash and red and white gouache (verso), on blue wove paper

Original size

29.4 × 21.9 cm (11 5/8 × 8 5/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Romanticism

This double-sided sheet offers a rare glimpse into Jean Baptiste Carpeaux's sculptural imagination at its most restless, capturing preparatory studies for his celebrated Ugolino group alongside a vivid crowd scene rendered in rich gouache. Carpeaux made this work in 1857–58 while studying at the French Academy in Rome, a period when his ambitions were outrunning the conservative tastes of his patrons. The recto studies — pen and black ink touched with pink gouache on blue paper — show him working out the anguished tangle of figures that would define his breakthrough sculpture, Ugolino and His Sons. The verso's red-robed prelate, built up in layered wash and white gouache, reveals the same eye for theatrical presence that would later make his portrait busts feel uncannily alive. The Ugolino group, eventually exhibited at the 1863 Salon, caused a sensation for bringing raw emotional violence into neoclassical sculpture — and this sheet is part of the thinking that got him there. Now held in the Art Institute of Chicago, the original's delicate interplay of blue paper, ink, and gouache is faithfully interpreted in this hand-painted oil reproduction, preserving both the intimacy of a working sketch and the commanding energy of a sculptor who thought in three dimensions even when holding a pen.