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This study uncovers the plethora of new, innovative drawing strategies that shaped French visual arts at the height of France’s imperial power. HoraceLecoq de Boisbaudran, Eugene Guillaume, and Félix Ravaisson, among others, designed new drawing procedures that responded to leading concernsof modern art and the exigencies of modern life: landscape painting and picturesque tourism, industrial design, and the use of drawing as vehicles ofknowledge production and in social control. From graphic regimes that were “purement mathématique” and demanded the practice of orthographicprojection, to those that privileged the articulation of proportions and the cultivation of an internal measuring system, fin de siècle educators in thefine and applied arts radically transformed drawing strategies and its history. The shifting parameters of drawing pedagogy and practice unfold onto awider set of theoretical concerns central to humanistic inquiry and art-making today: the philosophy and cultural history of habit-based learning, therelation between industrialization and drawing, and the relation between art and mathematics.

Dr. Shana Cooperstein is an art historian with nearly a decade of experience publishing academic research, supporting museums and public history,and teaching in higher education. As demonstrated by her first book Drawing Pedagogy in Modern France: Habit’s Demise (Routledge, 2024),Cooperstein’s interdisciplinary scholarship is motivated by unresolved questions about the role of human sense perception in the development of art-making strategies. She currently is conducting research on the history of the metric system and its implication for the arts, and is developing a secondbook manuscript tentatively titled, “Les frères Régamey: Art and the Imperial Gaze under the Third Republic.” This project explores the profoundramifications for artistic production made by France’s Third Republic investment in establishing overseas colonies in the years between 1870-1918.

Shana Cooperstein