#academic nude

Photographed in 1886, the position this strong young man adopts is reminiscent of the famous Flandrin pose, but more tense and tightly tucked.

A fine-figured Frenchman working as an artists’ model, photographed by Gaudenzio Marconi, c1865. We have already seen this magnificent bearded gent in a much more contemplative pose.

From the 1894 portfolio of academic nudes Der Act, by photographers Max Koch and Otto Rieth.

Further artists’ reference photographs from 1870s France, from the studio of Louis Jean-Baptiste Igout, in addition to those shared previously. The third here is my favourite of the set, as though one describes the features of some wondrous landscape while the other surveys the scene with eager admiration!

An unidentified male model, photographed by painter and teacher Heinrich Eickmann, for his book Kunststudien über den nackten menschlichen Körper (’Art studies of the naked human body’), published in the year 1900.

A 19th Century nude by French academic and photographer Edmond Desbonnet, with a quite quite marvellous moustache! The lacy tracery of leaf skeleton protecting his modesty appears to have been added at the time of processing, editing of photographs began long before the commonplace computerised trickery of our own era.

Part of a series of German outdoor nudes by Max Koch, 1897.