Mannelijk naakt, liggend op de zij, naar rechts 1726

This red chalk drawing of a male nude, lying on his side, was made by Louis Fabritius Dubourg. It is housed in the Rijksmuseum. During the 18th century, the rise of art academies across Europe solidified the practice of life drawing as central to artistic training. This drawing might very well have been made within the context of the academy. Through the practice of drawing from the nude, artists were expected to learn the rules of ideal human proportions and anatomy that would then enable them to represent mythological or historical subjects in a suitably elevated style. But there was also some resistance to this institutionalisation, and some artists continued to believe in the primacy of nature over academic rules. Drawings like this were not made for public display. Instead, they were part of the hidden pedagogy of the art academy. Art historians can better understand the social and institutional context of these artworks through archival research and analysis of the educational practices of the time.