2-999-292 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Arab Kneeling in Prayer, c1875. Charles Bargue produced relatively few paintings and is best known for his prints and drawing manuals. In his early career, he produced lithographs after his own comedic genre paintings as well as the nudes and genre scenes of others. Bargue never showed his paintings at the Salon but did exhibit a series of reproductive lithographs at the Salons of 1867 and 1868. He died insane in a mental asylum in April 1883. He was largely forgotten for a long time, but in recent years, has begun to attract increasing market and scholarly interest. Bargue has often been cited as a pupil of Gérôme, but contemporary texts stress that he was an assistant and collaborator. The two men worked together on the first two volumes of a major drawing manual, "Cours de Dessin," which was published in three parts between 1868 and 1872.