Smith College Museum of Art

 

Last week I visited Smith College in Northampton, MA to view the bulb show on display in their greenhouses. As usual it was a lovely and needed exhibit to get a whiff of Spring as Winter marches on here in southern Vermont.

Shortly afterwards I visited the art museum on the same campus. The permanent collection has quite a variety of paintings and objects in their collections. In one of their back rooms they have a lovely collection of drawings on exhibit.

This figure drawing from the collection caught my eye and imagination ever since I saw it. The accuracy, gracefulness and mastery of the line work is amazing. With just a few lines of pen this artist captures the character, fashion and time period of the subject matter.

The Italian artist and architect sited is Lodovico Cardi(1559 - 1613) known as Cigoli. He trained in Florence and later moved to Rome. This is a study of Jacob from Jacob's Dream drawn with brown ink on cream laid paper.