Faun

The dancing faun bronze sits centre gallery in the National Archaeological Museum, Naples.  It was found in a grand house built in the second century BCE , damaged in the Earthquake of AD62 and buried in ash in the eruption AD69 which obliterated Pompeii.  This sketch was an essay in the use of the graphite stick to build tones and leave highlight.

My daughter had retired fatigued to a bench some distance away and so drew the same subject largely from memory and imagination, making use of the black card I had put in her sketchbook to stiffen it for drawing.  I think also she found close proximity to its male nakedness a little challenging as a subject for drawing.  

She was unaware that I had already already steered her past the adjacent “secret room” containing priapic amulets and statuettes from Pompeii so shocking that, at various times since the eighteenth century, they have been held in a bricked up repository, and at others, shown only to persons of mature age and respectable morals, which apparently means old men.  I wish I had sketched in the secret room myself, but I too found standing there drawing those comic grotesque artefacts a little challenging.