Woman Holding Book

In these two drawings, Daniel Huntington worked his way toward the final composition for his painting of an ideal figure subject titled The Sketcher: A Portrait of Mlle Rosina, a Jewess. Drawing directly from a model, he experimented with variations of the pose. The margins are filled with further studies for the placement of the hands. Pose and composition were Huntington’s primary concerns in his preparatory work. In the finished painting, he significantly altered the figure’s proportions and elaborated the details of the costume. Trained in the academic method by the leading American artist Samuel F. B. Morse, Huntington remained an active proponent of traditional academic practice in his capacity as president of New York’s National Academy of Design, nineteenth-century America’s leading art school, from 1862 to 1870 and from 1877 to 1890.