In his Natural History, the ancient Roman writer Pliny the Elder refers to a 'blood-coloured' stone, known as haematite, or iron ore. Doctors used it, he said, to staunch bleeding. By the Renaissance, hematite's uses had expanded: synthesised into crayon form, it was regularly used to create red-pigmented drawings. However, it never lost its association with the human body: Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael used it to make anatomical studies.

Though 'sanguine', as it came to be known (after the Latin word for 'blood'), had immediate appeal, sanguine crayons were greasy and difficult to erase. As a result, in Western Europe, red chalk drawings only became widespread with advances in paper manufacture. From the mid-seventeenth century, developments in sizing – which affected how paper responded to inks and grease – and in the manufacture of paper, facilitating a much smoother surface, made this awkward medium easier to use. After this, there was little stopping it.

The Muscles of the Left Leg, Seen from the Front, and the Bones and Muscles of the Right Leg Seen in Right Profile, and between Them, a Patella 1515–1520 (?)

Michelangelo (1475–1564)

Wellcome Collection

In his study of two legs, Michelangelo's concentrated chalk marks suggest the density and the tonality of muscle on bone; hatching creates a sense of three-dimensionality, but also alludes to the banded appearance of striated muscle tissue. The association between the medium and what it represents is appropriate: both 'hematite' and 'sanguine' derive, respectively, from the ancient Greek and Latin words for 'blood'.

Virtually every artist and stationer had a different method of making red chalk, resulting in a correspondingly wide range of possible tonalities. Once mastered, however, sanguine allowed artists to add colour values to their drawings, beginning to bridge the gap between graphic art and painting. Peter Paul Rubens' spectacular drawing of his new wife, the 16-year-old Helena Fourment, encapsulates this union, combining the intimacy of the private study with the artistic ambition of the painted portrait.

At over 60 centimetres high, the drawing is virtually life-sized, and it shows Helena in the act of raising her veil, a device originally used in Classical sculptures of 'pudicity' ('modesty', or 'chastity'), traditionally associated with marital fidelity. Here, sanguine is combined with white and black – a technique known as 'trois crayons' (three crayons). Red appears at Helena's hands, breast and face, and in areas of the hair, suggesting the warmth and vitality of her body in contrast to the range of grey tones and white highlights that carefully delineate her spectacular costume, including her fashionable pom-pom hat (known as a 'huyck').

Saskia Sitting Up in Bed, Holding a Child

Another Northern European artist, Rembrandt, exploited sanguine's warmth and intimacy to different ends in his study of his own wife, Saskia. She is shown in bed with the couple's first child. The loose handling of the chalk suggests a spontaneous, intimate study, the red tonality evoking the warmth of candlelight, and (perhaps) the love the figures share. At the same time, the composition retains Rembrandt's characteristic interest in contrasts of light and dark. Darker red hatching indicates the features of his wife, while the looser areas allow the white paper itself to stand in for the white linen – bedsheet, nightdress, curtain – that envelops her.

In 1663, 30 years after Rembrandt's drawing, the court painter Charles Le Brun undertook a portrait study of his monarch, the young Louis XIV. Le Brun makes altogether more formal use of the 'trois crayons' technique, which here facilitates a clear distinction between the king's face (in red) and the less significant areas of hair and hat (in black). The 25-year-old king was just recovering from scarlet fever, and while red chalk enables Le Brun – a keen physiognomist – to call attention to the subtleties of the king's expression, it probably also serves the practical function of maximising the visual information the artist could capture from a very brief sitting. He probably re-used this study for the later tapestry series L'Histoire du Roy (1662–1673).

As is clear from the precision of Le Brun's portrait, sanguine's comparatively unforgiving qualities made it well suited to the academic techniques of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In addition, artists soon discovered that blotting their drawings with another sheet of paper would not only fix the greasy chalk but also create a mirror-image reproduction, known as a 'counterproof', which could be used in teaching, transferring and for wider circulation. These developments went hand in hand with a newly elevated status for drawing. Roger de Piles stressed its importance as a means of 'expressing [the artist's] thoughts clearly and vividly.' His ideas chimed with popular interest in spontaneity and visual effects – this was an age that prized dazzling conversation and illusionistic interior design. Drawings promised an insight into the artist's working process, and even their 'spirit'. While allowing for the widest possible range of surface effects, red chalk also made these drawings appear more finished and more attractive to collectors.

As a result, over the course of the eighteenth century, sanguine came to dominate drawing. The artist at the forefront of the exploration of sanguine was Jean-Antoine Watteau. Born in Valenciennes on the French-Flemish border, Watteau had always looked to Northern European artists and he may have begun exploring sanguine partly in imitation of Rubens. His early study of a Satyr pouring wine, planned for a ceiling series, is vigorously handled, using the 'trois crayons' technique and again focusing the sanguine in the areas of the face, hands and nipples, giving an earthly, fleshy quality to this bacchanalian subject. Watteau uses the full tonal range available to him, from the wine jug and lower thigh, barely sketched in, to the heavily shaded head and forearm.

Over the course of his relatively short career, Watteau made hundreds of sanguine drawings. Unusually for the time, many were preserved and partially published after his death, as Figures de differents caractères (c.1726–1728), issued by the collector Jean de Jullienne. In itself, this testifies to drawing's increased popularity and academic status – but a sheet in the Ashmolean Museum demonstrates Watteau's mastery of the medium.

Head of a boy in profile to right

c.1717–1721, black & red chalk on laid paper by Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721)

This head of a white boy in profile makes use of an astonishing range of red chalk marks – used in conjunction with black, and with delicately stumped white highlights – to suggest a broader colour tonality than is actually present. Though he was by no means impervious to the racism of his time, Watteau was also demonstrably interested in how sanguine carried across different skin tones, making similarly sensitive studies of a young Black boy, three of which appear on a sheet in the Louvre.

As well as variety of mark-making, artists using sanguine also exploited the chromatic qualities of their paper. Watteau typically uses an off-white ground; in the 1750s, the Venetian artist Giovanni Battista Tiepolo made a series of preparatory studies for a ceiling in the Wurzburg Residence in Bavaria using sanguine on blue paper. As De Piles noted in his 1684 guide for artists, tinted sheets had been invented partly 'to save the labour of the chalk,' facilitating a clearer representation of mid-tones. This made it particularly appropriate for study drawings like Tiepolo's, avoiding wasted effort establishing shadow. Instead, Tiepolo uses white chalk highlights and stumping to bring to life the face of his model, traditionally believed to be his son, Lorenzo.

By mid-century, sanguine's use by artists like Rembrandt, Watteau and Tiepolo had given it a specific set of popular associations within broader Western European art, with the human body and the natural world, and with a certain spontaneity and vigour of handling. In England, one of the most French-inflected artists of the period, Thomas Gainsborough, chose to paint many of his lively landscapes in red: that he opted for sepia wash, rather than sanguine chalk, demonstrates the endurance of sanguine as a visual language beyond the specificity of the medium itself.

Though red chalk continued to appear in the following century, increasingly its association with the art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often gave it a specific historical valence. The later work of the Anglo-Italian painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti was characterised by single female figures in languid poses, frequently rendered in red chalk.

Wooded Landscape with a Cowman Herding Cows

The smudged sanguine in a series of studies for the painting La Pia de' Tolomei (1868) gives these images a dreamy, sensual quality, while their textural richness further blurs the line between finished painting and preparatory study. Their stated historicism – the subject is drawn from Dante's Purgatorio (c.1321) – is complemented and to a certain extent underlined by the red chalk, established as a favourite with Leonardo, Michelangelo and, of course, Raphael, the painter alluded to by the Pre-Raphaelite movement, of which Rossetti had been a founding member.

Rossetti's model for La Pia de' Tolomei was Alexa Wilding, whose red hair had caught his attention while she was walking down the street. The society painter Paul-César Helleu also had a red-haired model: his wife, Alice, who appears in a series of studies rendered in black, red and white chalk, holding their young child. Here, in contrast to the smudged surfaces of Rossetti, or the stumping and highlights of Watteau and Rubens, the 'trois crayons' technique takes on a graphic quality, modelling effected primarily through vigorous lines of red and black, giving this intimate image a glamourous sheen that is – despite its historicism – inescapably a product of 'La Belle Époque'.

Two Studies of a Mother and Child: 'Maternite'

As is clear from the number and range of sanguine drawings in existence today, the chalk's endurance is a product of its versatility, and the range and types of tones it can create. However, though its textural richness made it a natural companion to the light-hearted illusionism of the eighteenth-century Rococo movement, and the bravura handling of Rembrandt and Michelangelo, its endurance beyond this probably speaks to something more fundamental. As suggested by its name, sanguine has a unique ability to suggest the blood dancing in its subjects' veins. In the process, it encapsulates the warmth and humanity that drawing does best.

Kirsten Tambling, art historian

This content was made possible by the Bridget Riley Art Foundation

Further reading

Jo Hedley, 'Towards a New Century: Charles de la Fosse as a Draftsman', Master Drawings, 39:3, 2001

Marianne Roland Michel, 'The Golden Age of Sanguine', The Burlington Magazine, 120:907, 1978

Roger de Piles, Les premiers élémens de la peinture pratique, Paris, 1684

Thomas Puttfarken, Roger de Piles' Theory of Art, Yale University Press, 1985