Reclining nude male figure,

late 18th century

Life drawing was at the core of the rigorous curriculum of the French Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, which was founded in 1648 and dissolved in 1791. Only after several years of copying two-dimensional works was a student allowed to draw the male nude model. By the mid-eighteenth century life drawing was synonymous with the acedemy itself: Diderot’s Encyclopédie defined it as "a public school where painters go to draw or paint, and sculptors to model, after a nude man called the model." These two examples of models in reclining poses reflect the highly influential, crisp red-chalk style of Carle van Loo, a leading painter in mid-eighteenth-century France who became director of the Académie in 1763, after teaching there for many years.