ART REVIEW : Master Works From Painter’s Point of View

Since the world doesn’t seem to know where it’s headed, there’s a tendency to look to the past for clues. A small show of 15 master drawings at the Getty hardly seems fertile ground for such investigation, but it does have pertinent vectors, as well as handsome works.

“Jonathan Richardson Senior as a Collector of Drawings” is about an 18th-Century British portrait painter better remembered for his connoisseurship than his own work. In fact, Horace Walpole said, “He drew nothing well below the head and was void of imagination.”

A self-portrait confirms that he could do a superior facial rendering and suggests the accuracy of Walpole’s further description of Richardson as “a formal man, with a slow but loud and sonorous voice, and, in truth, with some affectation in his manner.”

The accent of both Richardson’s drawing and Walpole’s comments suggest a world very different from our own. In it, being an elitist counted as a virtue. An amateur was not some bumbling hobbyist but a person with the means to pursue such esoteric interests as the collecting of drawings for their own sake. In such a society, artists conformed to social norms and, if they excelled, became virtual peers of their aristocratic patrons. Artist Richardson achieved this mostly by buying drawings because he loved them, then selling some to wealthy collectors because he liked the income.

It’s a very different model than that of the modern concept of the artist as a rebellious, bohemian outsider. In fact, many a modern artist has acted as a combination collector and agent but tended to do so on the sly, as if the practice didn’t suit the artistic image. (Now economics may regain the practice some respectability.)

Because he was an artist, Richardson had an edge on his well-born patrons. He really knew what he was looking at. He wrote several books taking a quasi-scientific approach to the question of style, and a number of them are on view. Eventually, it came to be generally accepted that if a drawing bore his collector’s mark it was certain to be authentic.

Works on view, drawn from Getty holdings by curator Nicholas Turner, seem to make two intertwined points. Richardson respected academic craftsmanship as the very foundation of excellence. A 14th-Century Italian work from Umbria depicts a draped figure holding a book. Its rather dour character is overtaken by the solidity of its rendering. In a 15th-Century sheet from Padua, lyricism takes flight: A full-length, nude Bacchus playing the pipes manages to combine sweet seduction with animal energy.

Richardson was a real sucker for drawings with no significance besides pure rendering. There are studies of drapery and hands with no expressive aura outside the artists technical felicity. But he clearly knew the difference between such bravura demonstrations and drawings with soul.

Paolo Veronese was a Mannerist virtuoso without peer, but his tiny study of about 10 figures in “Christ Preaching in the Temple” has the rhythm of a graceful dance. Annibale Carracci was a pioneer of the classic Baroque, but Richardson liked his sheet of head studies that are as earthy as a Dutch genre painter.

For a chap so overtly conventional, Richardson had a sharp eye for the offbeat. The great Peter Paul Rubens is represented by an extremely rare depiction of a Korean gentleman. As exotic as the subject matter must have seemed, Richardson, like the artist, was most attracted by the dynamite rendering of his robe’s heavy sleeve.

Equally surprising is the idea of the heartfelt Rembrandt being fascinated with the courtly delicacy of India’s Mughal miniatures. But here hangs the evidence in “Shah Jahan and Dara Shikoh.” Next to it is a study for “Christ and the Canaanite Woman” in Rembrandt’s more familiar manner. It reminds us that for all his gravity, he was no stranger to refinement.

There is nothing odd about this smart little show except that it appears in a confused world where superior talent and intelligence are somehow held in suspicion.

* J. Paul Getty Museum, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, through Jan. 28, closed Mondays, advance parking reservations required, (310) 458-2003.