Ethel Brooke Hinson Venus de' Medici

An original 19th-century chalk drawing from the antique, Ethel Brooke Hinson, Venus de' Medici.

A beautiful and impressive large-scale drawing in black chalk by Ethel Brooke Hinson (b.c.1863, fl.1883–1891), depicting the antique marble sculpture the Venus de' Medici. This is one of a pair of drawings by Hinson that we have for sale, the other of which depicts Discophoros (see stock number JU-117).

Venus de' Medici is a Hellenistic marble sculpture depicting the Greek goddess of love Aphrodite, now housed at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. It is a 1st-century BC marble copy, perhaps made in Athens, of a bronze original Greek sculpture, following the type of the Aphrodite of Knidos, which would have been made by a sculptor in the immediate Praxitelean tradition, perhaps at the end of the century. Hinson's depiction of the sculpture differs from the Uffizi marble in that the arms are missing. In the 17th-century the arms had been restored by the Italian Baroque sculptor Ercole Ferrata (1610–1686), who gave them long tapering Mannerist fingers, which by the 19th century were recognised as out of keeping with the sculpture. It seems likely that Hinson omitted the arms in this drawing in rejection of the Ferrata restoration.

The present drawing was produced when Ethel Brooke Hinson was a student at the Royal Academy Schools. There is little further information recorded about Hinson other than she went on to study at Herkomer’s Art School at Bushey in Hertfordshire at some point between 1883 and 1900, and she exhibited at the Royal Academy during the late 19th century. A painting by Hinson is in the National Museum Wales.

The artist Frederick Richard Pickersgill RA was the Visitor supervising the Antique School when this drawing was executed; it was common for students to sign the Visitor's name on the front of their drawing. Pickersgill was himself a devotee to figure drawing and was greatly influenced by the older artist William Etty (1787–1849), who was untiringly assiduous in copying from the antique.

Drawing from the antique was central to the arts education provided by the Academy, and since 1808 the British Museum had regularly opened its newly established Townley Gallery so that art students could draw from the Graeco-Roman sculptures housed there. The present drawing represents an interesting time in the history of women students at the Academy. Women had only relatively recently been admitted to the RA Schools, from when, in 1860, Laura Herford was admitted by accident after submitting drawings using only her initials. In the late 1870s and early 1880s women students had to fight for equality through a series of petitions written to the President requesting the right 'to study from the figure', and it was only in 1883 that the RA Schools would provide a life class 'for the study of the partially draped figure' for the female students.

In black chalk on cream wove paper. One of a pair that we have for sale (see JU-117).