Reclining Old Man

Lallemant left his native Lorraine for Paris around 1601. Throughout the first quarter of the 1600s he was one of the city's most prominent painters. In addition to providing designs for prints and tapestries, he painted numerous altarpieces and other religious works. This drawing, which may represent one of the four Evangelists, demonstrates the artist's ability to fuse an expressive, earthy realism with elegance and monumentality. The bold use of black pen and white heightening suggests that the drawing served as a model for a chiaroscuro woodcut, an early type of color printing.