(After Goya's "The Straw Manikin")

 

James Mahlon Rosen

  1933 - 2023 (biography)

1977  

red conte crayon on paper 

10 x 8" image (approx.) 

pencil, lower center along sheet edge 

1 of 1 unique 

pencil titled, dated; "8th study for 2nd set of drawings for Entre Nous, 29 VI VV" 

 

ivory charcoal 

 

 

24717 

$900.00 

Two years prior to this drawing, James Rosen painted one of his mysterious Old Master homages - this time of Goya's "The Straw Manikin" - using his muted-tone oil and wax emulsion technique to coax from a murky fog the image of the four women tossing a straw man into the air. The painting, originally titled "El Pelele", was commissioned by Charles IV when Goya was the official court painter. It became a thinly veiled commentary on the decline of traditional Spanish masculinity, as well as the arrival of French style and manners, seen by Goya as frivalous and shallow. Rosen was clearly taken with the Spanish painter's theme of capricious women (which would show up again in Goya's etching "Disparate Feminino" in 1816) as he returned to it in this conte crayon drawing.