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VISUAL ARTS:AS INGRES famously proclaimed: “Drawing is the probity of art.” But he was speaking at a time – the first half of the 19th century – when paintings were still constructed on formidable armatures of preparatory drawings. Elaborating on his theme, he went on to describe a painting as effectively little more than a colour-tinted drawing.

Some of the plein airpainters were already shifting the emphasis away from drawing in that sense, and the Impressionists were to do so decisively within a few decades. In fact, look much further back in European painting and you will find individual painters who eschewed the rigorous, drawing-based approach to picture-making. Ingres’s views represented the high point of a particular academic tradition.