Watteau: Drawings

At last, the Royal Academy of Arts is to open an art exhibition worthy of the name! Forget all that tosh in Modern British Sculpture and the hopeless experiments of its students. This one is worth a tenner (£8 silver surfers) because it includes a £2.50 gallery guide in its price and it is the first retrospective of this artist's drawings in the UK. Watteau: The Drawings opens in the Sackler Wing of Galleries on 12 March and runs until 5 June. French artist Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) was a master of the trois crayons technique (three chalks) as you can see in his trois crayons drawing of a young girl above. White is for highlights, red for flesh tones and medium tones, black for shadow and darker tones. The technique produces a more in-depth drawing than a pencil sketch. The exhibition contains over 80 such works on paper. Watteau used them as references for his paintings.