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JEAN-BAPTISTE-JOSEPH WICAR
Lille 1762 ~ 1843 Rome
Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Wicar was a pupil of Louis Watteau in Lille before entering the studio of Jacques-Louis David, in Paris, in 1781. He accompanied David to Rome in 1784–1785. He remained in Italy from 1787 to
1793, and spent time in both Rome and Florence where he made drawings for an album entitled Tableaux, Statues, Bas-reliefs et Camées de la Galerie de Florence et du Palais Pitti. In 1793 Wicar was back in
Paris with David and the following year he was appointed Keeper of Antiquities at the Louvre. Under the authority of Napoleon, he returned to Italy in 1797 as part of the special committee entrusted with selecting
works of art for export to France. He was elected a member of the Academia di San Luca, Rome, in 1805, and was director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples under Joseph Bonaparte. He was a popular painter
of portraits and history paintings, in the style of David, and was well-known for his famous collections of drawings. He bequeathed his third and last collection to the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille.1
Our drawing is clearly related to antique sculpture – possibly to a
Roman relief depicting The Sacrifice of Ephigenia.2 The male figure probably resembles a victimarius (an assistant at sacrifice) standing by the bull and the female figure Ephigenia being led to sacrifice.3 The medium of black chalk heightened with white is common to many of Wicar's drapery studies. Our drawing is also close stylistically to the artist's two studies for The
Raising of the Son of the Widow of Nain4 where the figures share the same drapery convention of a looped fold at the waist. A very interesting comparison can be made between our sheet and the group of three angels on the left in the painting by Piero della Francesca, The
Baptism of Christ, c.1450, National Gallery, London. The draperies and stance of the figures is so close that one is tempted to presume a common source for both.
The figure group in our drawing is
also similar to two figures on the right-hand side of a composition study for Wicar's lost painting, The Death of Phocion, Academia di Belle Arti, Perugia. Therefore, our sheet is possibly preparatory for
that painting.5
1. M. Fumaroli, Master Works from the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille, exh. cat. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1992, pp. 23–26.
2. I am most grateful to Dr Ruth Rubinstein for help with this entry.
3. Ovid, Metamorphosis, Book XII, lines 27ff. (Tr. M. M. Innes, Penguin Books, 1955, p. 269).
4. M. Gordon & M Aldega, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Wicar, Drawings, Rome, 1995, pp 71 – 75, figs 38 & 42.
5.Ibid., p. 154 illus.
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