The tender line - a selection of portrait drawings and studies

 

Jonathan (Portrait of Jonathan Tichenor), by Paul Cadmus, 1942.

Lucien Simon, by Ramon Casas, 1900.

Sketch of a model, probably Nicola d'Inverno, by John Singer Sargent, circa 1890-1915.

Self-portrait, by Valentin Serov, 1883.

Portrait by O. Metzler, circa 1920s.

Portrait en buste de profil vers la gauche d'Alexandre-Michel Beljame à Rome, by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1812.

 Leighton "Luckie" Lucas, by Dame Laura Knight, 1920.

Portrait study, by John Singer Sargent, 1911.

Portrait of Carl Rosenlächer, by Marie Ellenrieder, circa 1840-45.

Portrait of René Degas, the artist's brother, by Edgar Degas, circa 1859.

 My son Boris, by Leonid Osipovich Pasternak, 1923.

 Young Man Looking Left, by Francesco Salviati, circa 1540.

Noel Carrington, the artist's brother, by Dora Carrington, circa 1912.

 Portrait of an Eighteen Year Old Youth, by Albrecht Dürer, 1503.

Self-portrait, by Mark Gertler, 1909.

Head of a Man, by Adolph von Menzel, 1886 (?).

Portrait of a Boy, by Hans Robert Pippal, 1941.

Ursin-Jules Vatinelle, by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1820.

Portrait eines jungen Mannes im Profil von links, by Marie Ellenrieder, circa second quarter of the nineteenth century.

Henry Sturgis Russell, by John Singer Sargent, 1924,

Assan, a Young Man, by Jean-Léon Gérôme, circa 1855-56.

 Portrait of a Young Man, by Nicholas Henri Jacob, 1821.

To wear a straw hat - four photographs of José “Pete” Martinez by George Platt Lynes, 25 May 1937

 

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From his time with the PaJaMa artist collective, most likely taken on Fire Island, New York, circa 1937-39. (Five images.)

José Antonio Martinez-Berlanga (he sometimes used the stage name Pete Stefan; 13 March 1913, Mexico - 24 June 1997, Pasadena), dancer, teacher, and artist's muse. He was born in Mexico, but his family moved to Houston, Texas while he was still quite young, and he became involved in dance early on; his mother had been a folklórico dancer back in Mexico. After graduating high school, he moved to New York to study at the School of American Ballet and, upon graduation, he was invited to join the company. 

In 1936, at the age of twenty-three, he met and began a relationship with philanthropist, arts patron, and ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein. Only two years previously, Kirstein, along with George Balanchine and Edward Warburg had founded the school and dance company. And the year the couple met, Martinez joined Kirstein's second company, the touring Ballet Caravan. The two lived together for several years, and Martinez associated with the loose group of friends that was centered on the artist collective and personal ménage that called itself "PaJaMa" - after the initials of artists Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and French's wife Margaret - where he was a frequent subject of photographs and a model for Cadmus. (George Platt Lynes was another participant in the group.) 

His relationship with Kirstein continued until the latter married Cadmus' sister, Fidelma, in 1941; she moved into the apartment the two men shared, and Martinez continued to live with them for the first year of their marriage. After being denied enlistment at the beginning of WWII, he began work at a Jewish refugee hostel in Haverford, Pennsylvania. Writer Christopher Isherwood was already working there - the two had met previously, in 1939 - and they developed a close, occasionally intimate, friendship. Finally allowed to join the military in 1943, he was in Northern France at the end of the war. 

Returning to New York, he resumed his career with Ballet Society, Balanchine and Kirstein's latest incarnation of their ballet company. (It finally became the New York City Ballet in 1948, the name it retains to this day.) But a lingering knee injury put an end to his performing career in 1947. He eventually decided to become a teacher and opened his own dance studio in Norfolk, Virginia. He later founded other dance studios in Ohio and then California, where he worked until retiring in the mid-1960’s. He died at the age of eighty-four, a year and a half after Kirstein.

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Portrait of Martinez by Paul Cadmus, 1937.

Jared French by Paul Cadmus - "Jerry", 1931

Paul Cadmus (December 17, 1904, New York City – December 12, 1999, Weston, Connecticut), American painter, best known for paintings that combined eroticism and and social commentary, and for his drawings of the male nude.  Jared French (1905–1988), Cadmus' great friend and onetime lover, was another of the American artists who, along with Cadmus and George Tooker, worked in a style often described as magic realism.