Study from the Antique Sculpture of "Laocoön" c. 1801

Curator: This is Washington Allston's "Study from the Antique Sculpture of Laocoön." It's a pencil drawing, likely from early in his career, sometime around the early 1800s. Editor: It feels so… tentative. A whisper of a sculpture, barely there. The soft greys almost make the agony seem muted, internalized. Curator: Well, think about the original Laocoön. It was a key work in the formation of Neoclassical ideals, and Allston, like many artists, would have studied it to understand form and expression. Editor: But it feels more than just an exercise. The unfinished quality, the raw paper… it's like he's capturing the ghost of an ideal, a painful struggle with classical perfection. What do you think he was trying to capture? Curator: I think Allston wanted to use it as a study of the body and of the form. Editor: It feels like a portrait of wrestling with artistic legacy itself. Fascinating, isn’t it, how a study can reveal so much.