Sanguine about Sanguine

Newly listed, this pair of 18th-century French studies in sanguine. The ear studies appear to be a copy after the French painter and physiognomist Charles Le Brun (1619–1690), whose drawing manual on human emotions has been used for centuries by artists and students as a model for depicting facial expressions. Le Brun's approach was insistently scientific, drawing on the work of the philosopher René Descartes to better understand what causes expressions in the first place. The hand study is in the manner of Pierre Thomas Le Clerc (1740–1799), whose work was reproduced as crayon-manner etchings in the publication 'Cahier de Principes de Dessins d'après Nature' in 1773.