The Sleeping Rinaldo

Date

1686

Creator

The present drawing is a study for one of a pair of pendant paintings commissioned by the Duke of Montagu, the British ambassador to the French court from 1675 to 1699...In La Fosse’s drawing style, color becomes more important than line for his conception of form. This is well demonstrated in the Snite piece, where the artist uses blue paper and three colors of chalk (black, red, and white) to articulate rhythm and movement even more so than structure. Even in repose, the figure communicates an energy and dynamism that signals the dramatic narrative unfolding in the sixteenth-century poet Tasso’s epic Jerusalem Liberated. from Snay, The Epic and the Intimate: French Drawings from the John D. Reilly Collection (Notre Dame, 2011)