Study for "Gil Blas and the Archbishop" (from Sketchbook of Figure and Landscape Subjects)
Francis William Edmonds American
Not on view
The execution of sketches and studies was a crucial part of Edmonds’s creative process. Many of his drawings exist as independent works--apparently never taken further--but many others represent an initial step in his conception for paintings. This sketchbook, which he began about 1838, includes both types of drawings of a variety of subjects.
The present work is a well-developed preparatory study for Edmonds’s oil painting of about 1849 “Gil Blas and the Archbishop.” The theme derives from Alain-René Lesage’s eighteenth-century French novel “Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane,” which Edmonds had read in a translation by the English picaresque novelist
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