Jean-Baptiste Pater

Let’s notice all the attention paid by the artist to the complex drapery of the dress and to the light which animates it, occupying a large part of the surface of the sheet. Pater shared Watteau’s fascination with the billowing silk drapery of woman’s gowns. Whereas Watteau almost always rendered it in tiny folds, Pater worked it into voluminous swathes that are broadly chalked with dense shadowing in the heavy folds; it is one of the charms, not failings, of his opulent vision of feminine fashion that his gowns take on a life and form of their own, becoming grand carapaces little effected by the shape or pose of the body beneath.

The drawing is characteristic of Pater’s graphite technique. The artist privileged red chalk on buff paper. See for example the drawings at the Musée du Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.