Study of a Young Man's Head with Right Arm Outstretched

Sir John Edward Poynter · 1860

Medium

Black chalk and watercolor, heightened with white gouache on light blue paper

Original size

19.6 × 23.1 cm (7 3/4 × 9 1/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Romanticism

Study of a Young Man's Head with Right Arm Outstretched is a quietly arresting preparatory drawing — the kind of careful, intimate work that reveals an artist thinking through a problem before committing to canvas. Poynter made it in 1860, during the years he was consolidating his academic training after studying in Paris under Charles Gleyre alongside Whistler and du Maurier. That Parisian rigour shows here: the blue paper sets a mid-tone ground that lets the white gouache lift the light on the face and the outstretched arm with real precision, while the black chalk defines form without ever becoming heavy. It is a draughtsman's study, but one with unmistakable life in it. Poynter went on to become President of the Royal Academy and Director of the National Gallery, and his reputation rested largely on large-scale history paintings — but it was exercises like this one, now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, that underpinned everything he built. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates the tonal delicacy of the original into paint, preserving the fall of light across the figure and the quiet concentration of a pose caught in the moment before a larger work began.