Nude od a "Sleeping" Man, Half-Recumbent

Josef Bergler was appointed the first director of the Academy of Art in Prague. He was a versatile draughtsman and the author of numerous engravings and designs for prints. Some of his drawings were meant as literal models to be copied by the school’s students, while other ones were intended as general examples for their artwork. This also applied to the intermediate stage of their art training that focused on working with a live model. The study of the male nude did not only serve to train the students how to render the plasticity of the human body, its proportions and movement. Models were staged so as to express certain typical actions or roles, and – as the case may be – even mental states. In this case, the model seems to represent a sleeper, whose head (contrary to the then commonly observed requisite for the head to represent the sophistication of the human figure) appears deliberately at the very edge of the pictorial space.