Jacques-Louis David, the leading artist of the French Revolution, sketched
Marie Antoinette as few had seen her before. Perched on the edge of her seat on the way to her execution, arms bound, lank hair poking free of a decidedly unglamorous cap, David’s queen looks resigned, drawn and peculiarly ordinary. Yet there is a discernible defiance in the way she holds herself and purses her lips. Was this a message to the artist who voted to send her to the guillotine?

David’s drawing, done in pen and brown ink, is arresting because it is so unexpected. A good proportion of the hundred drawings reproduced in the art historian and former V&A curator Susan Owens’s new book have a similarly esoteric flavour. Instead of preparatory drawings for Paolo Uccello’s famous The Hunt in the Forest (c 1470), for example, we have his magnificent study of a chalice in three dimensions. The vessel looks like it was devised on an architect’s computer. From ancient Egypt, we are presented not with tomb graffiti but with a portrait inscribed on a palette belonging to a scribe of Ramesses II and a frivolous but fantastic sketch of a cat waiting on a mouse, which would not look out of place in the pages of Private Eye. 

Owens’s selection of artworks is superb. Each provides a plot point in her history of drawing from roughly 11,000 BC to the present day. Its scope is enormous, but the book feels suitably intimate. As Owens notes, drawings traditionally represent the private side of art, revealing artists as they