Woman Seated on a Tabouret

Henry Stacy Marks · n.d.

Medium

Black pastel, heightened with white gouache, on blue laid paper

Original size

34.2 × 23.4 cm (13 1/2 × 9 1/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Romanticism

Woman Seated on a Tabouret is a quietly compelling study in stillness — a figure caught in a private moment, rendered with remarkable economy across a sheet of rich blue laid paper. Henry Stacy Marks was one of the more versatile figures of the Victorian art world, best known today for his meticulously observed paintings of birds and his affiliation with the St John's Wood Clique, a loose circle of painters who favoured intimate genre subjects over grand historical canvases. This drawing reveals his accomplished draughtsmanship: he works in black pastel and then lifts form out of shadow with white gouache, using the blue ground as a middle tone that does much of the tonal heavy lifting. The result is sculptural without being laboured. Marks documented his career and friendships at length in his 1894 autobiography, Pen and Pencil Sketches, which confirms how seriously he took works on paper alongside his finished oils. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates Marks's delicate tonal interplay into paint — preserving the soft modelling of the figure, the quiet weight of the pose, and the understated mood that makes the original worth studying long after the eye first settles on it.