John Vanderpoel, charcoal figure study from The Human Figure, 1907

John Vanderpoel

1857–1911 · United States (born Netherlands)

Researched by Daniel Bilmes, painter and educator.

John Vanderpoel taught figure drawing by building the form from its large planes before any detail. He told students to see the head not as a soft oval but as a cube with rounded corners, with a clear front, side, and top, and to light the model so the shadow marked where one plane broke away from the next. He split drawing into two periods: first place each part in relation to the whole, then turn that placed part into its modelled form, holding the features subordinate to the larger planes throughout. He taught this at the Art Institute of Chicago for about thirty years, from 1880 to 1910, where Georgia O'Keeffe and J. C. Leyendecker were among his students, and he set the method down in The Human Figure (1907), illustrated with about 430 of his own drawings and still in print today.

ProcessConstructive TemperamentMeasured LineageAmerican

Signature moves

Settle the large planes before any detail

Held that the big planes of which the small forms are only a part must be understood first, so the eye finds the front, the side, and the top of a mass before it touches an eye, a lip, or a knuckle.

Why it matters · Most beginners draw the features and then try to hang a head around them, and it never sits in space. Vanderpoel reversed the order. Get the large planes right and the detail later drops onto a form that already turns in three dimensions. It is the same logic Bridgman taught a generation later at the Art Students League.

John H. Vanderpoel, The Human Figure, 1907

Picture the head as a cube with rounded corners

Taught the student to see the head not as a soft oval but as a block, "a cube with all its corners and edges rounded," so its six planes could be felt mentally even when only a few were visible from a given view.

Why it matters · A cube has a clear front, sides, top, and bottom, and each one catches light differently. Thinking of the head as a rounded cube gives you the planes to model against, which is why a drawn head reads as solid instead of as a flat mask with features painted on.

John H. Vanderpoel, The Human Figure ("imagine a cube with all its corners and edges rounded"), 1907

Light the figure to separate the planes

Lit the model deliberately so the strong light and shade marked where the breadth of a form, its front or back, broke away from its thickness, then drew that separation as the structure of the figure.

Why it matters · Light is not decoration on the form, it is the thing that tells you where one plane ends and the next begins. His own charcoal studies are titled for exactly this, separating front from side through strong light and shade. Set your light to reveal the turn of the planes and the shadow does your drawing for you.

John H. Vanderpoel, The Human Figure (the figure "so lighted as to show the separation of the planes"), 1907

Draw in two periods, place the part then turn it into form

Split the act of drawing into two stages of mind: first the search for the relative place each part occupies in the whole, then the work of turning that placed part into its actual, modelled form.

Why it matters · Trying to place a form and finish it in the same breath is why drawings go tight and wrong. Vanderpoel kept the two jobs apart. Locate everything in relation to everything else first, then and only then model it. The discipline is refusing to render a part before its place is true.

John H. Vanderpoel, The Human Figure (the two periods of drawing), 1907

Hold the standard, even over a student's feelings

Was gentle in person but exacting at the easel, reported to have told a student labouring over a hopeless sheet, "You're only dirtying your paper. Start another drawing," and to have kept after a pupil whose figures leaned left until she got glasses for her astigmatism.

Why it matters · A teacher who praises everything teaches nothing. The kindness and the hard standard were the same act for him. The lesson for a working painter is to be that honest with your own sheet: when a drawing is built on a wrong placement, the fix is a fresh start, not more rendering.

Essays on Chicago Artists, John Henry Vanderpoel (reported anecdotes), 2021

Turn the method into a system anyone could carry

Wrote his lectures down as The Human Figure in 1907, illustrated with about 430 of his own charcoal and pencil drawings, so the plane-by-plane method left the Chicago classroom and reached students who never met him.

Why it matters · A method kept in one studio dies with the teacher. By setting his down as a book, Vanderpoel made it transmissible: the Chicago Artists essay reports it ran through ten editions and sold 45,000 copies by 1921, and it is still in print. The move is to make your own working knowledge explicit enough that it can be handed on.

John H. Vanderpoel, The Human Figure; print run per Essays on Chicago Artists, 1907

Studio

Light: The drawing classrooms of the Art Institute of Chicago, a teaching atelier rather than a private painting studio. A press account describes him lecturing in the basement of the Art Institute with a skeleton standing on either side of him, the figure analysed from the bones outward.
Position: At the board and over the student's sheet, demonstrating construction. An observer wrote that his words flowed "quiet and clear as a meadow brook" and his drawing flowed "as if his very fingers thought."
Session length: Class lectures and demonstrations across about thirty years, from 1880 to 1910, plus roughly fifteen summers of outdoor classes at Delavan, Wisconsin and earlier at Riverside, Illinois and in Michigan.
Tools: Charcoal and pencil, the media of his construction drawing and of the 430 plates in his book · Two articulated skeletons, set on either side of him for the anatomy lectures · Plaster casts and the antique, and the living model, the two sources he drilled the figure from · Oil and watercolour for his own genre pictures and murals, a separate strand from the teaching
Notes: He became chief instructor and lecturer in drawing at the Art Institute around 1888 after two years at the Academie Julian, and held the figure-drawing chair until 1910. At fourteen a gymnasium accident left his back bowed for life, and at about thirty-five he lost the sight of his left eye, yet he kept the most demanding teaching post in the school.

Source: Essays on Chicago Artists, John Henry Vanderpoel, 2021

Palette

Ground: Drawing paper, white or toned. His teaching lived in charcoal and pencil on the page, so the working "ground" is the sheet, not a primed canvas. He also painted oils and watercolours, but the method this page describes is a drawing method.
Whites: White chalk or the bare paper for the lit planes of a form
Earths: Charcoal and graphite, the working media of the figure construction
Blacks: Vine and compressed charcoal
Medium: Charcoal and pencil for the figure work and the published plates. In his separate painting practice he worked in oil and watercolour on Dutch genre subjects, Chicago scenes, and murals, but this record stays honest that his documented method is drawing, not an oil palette.
Quantity: Not applicable to a drawing teacher; left blank rather than guessed.

Source: John H. Vanderpoel, The Human Figure (the charcoal and pencil plates), 1907

Workflow, from blank canvas

1. Place the large planes
Lay in the big planes of the figure, the front, side, and top of each major mass, before any feature or muscle is drawn.
Why: The minor forms are only parts of these large planes. Fixing the planes first gives the figure volume and direction from the start, so nothing later has to be forced to sit in space.
2. Find each part's place in the whole
In the first of his two periods, search for the relative place every part occupies, measuring it against everything around it before committing to its form.
Why: A part rendered before its placement is true is a part you will have to erase. Locating everything in relation to everything else first keeps the drawing honest.
3. Light the form to reveal the turns
Set a strong light so the shadow marks where the breadth of a form breaks from its thickness, where front turns to side, and read the figure by those separations.
Why: Light is the information that tells you where one plane ends and the next begins. Reading the figure through its light and shade is how the planes become visible to draw.
4. Subordinate the features to the large planes
Keep the eyes, nose, and mouth, however interesting in themselves, subordinate to the larger planes of the head of which they are a part.
Why: Features drawn for their own sake pull a head apart. Held under the big planes, they sit correctly and the head stays solid.
5. Turn the placed part into its actual form
In the second period, model each part that has been correctly placed, building its rounded, specific surface and its detail last.
Why: Detail laid onto a true structure reads in three dimensions. This is the modelling stage, and it only works because the placement and the planes were settled first.

Refusals — what they would not do

Refused to let the features or any detail precede the large planes, holding them subordinate until the structure was understood.
Refused modernism, keeping to the beaux-arts academic tradition he had trained in at the Academie Julian.
Refused to flatter careless work, reported to have told a struggling student to start a fresh drawing rather than keep dirtying the paper.
Refused to let a bowed back and the loss of one eye end his teaching, holding the figure-drawing chair for three decades.
Refused to keep the method to himself, writing it down as a book so students who never met him could learn it.

Reference

Primary source: The plaster cast and the antique for foundation drawing, and the living model in the life class. He drilled the figure from observation, then bent what he saw toward the underlying planes and construction.
Photography: He taught and drew from the cast and the live model, not from photographs. His published plates are constructed teaching figures, not transcriptions of a snapshot.

Exceptions

His own genre paintings and murals were worked up in oil and watercolour from studies, a separate practice from the figure-drawing instruction.

Lineage

Every teacher and student below sits on the site-wide teacher-student map.

Teachers

Chicago Academy of Design (later the School of the Art Institute of Chicago) · from the 1870s — His first training in drawing, in the school he would go on to teach in for thirty years.
Gustave Boulanger and Jules Lefebvre, Academie Julian, Paris · around 1886 to 1888, about two years — Academic French training under two leading atelier masters. The same Boulanger taught George Bridgman, the parallel American figure-drawing teacher, which is why their plane-and-mass methods rhyme.

Influences

The beaux-arts academic figure tradition of the Paris ateliers, carried back to Chicago and distilled into a teachable plane-by-plane system.

Students

J. C. Leyendecker, the Saturday Evening Post and Arrow Collar illustrator, whose figure command traces back to this Chicago training.
Georgia O'Keeffe, who studied under him at the Art Institute in 1905 to 1906 and called him "one of the few real teachers I have known."
Frederick Carl Frieseke, the American Impressionist.
Adam Emory Albright and many others across thirty years of Art Institute classes.

In their own words

“Before entering upon the study of the component parts of the body, it is of the highest importance that the large planes of which the minor forms are a part should be thoroughly understood.”

— John Vanderpoel, The Human Figure, 1907

The opening principle of his method: the big planes first, the features second. Verbatim from the 1907 text.

“Fully to realize the existence of these planes, imagine a cube with all its corners and edges rounded.”

— John Vanderpoel, The Human Figure, 1907

His instruction for seeing the head as a block with planes rather than a soft oval. Verbatim from the 1907 text.

“A very kind, generous little man, one of the few real teachers I have known.”

— Georgia O'Keeffe (on Vanderpoel), Georgia O'Keeffe (Viking Press), 1976

O'Keeffe in her autobiography, recalling the lectures she attended at the Art Institute in 1905 to 1906 and the copy of The Human Figure she bought and treasured. The original sentence uses a dash, replaced here with a comma.

Techniques and practices

plane-analysis-of-the-figure

large-masses-before-detail

head-as-rounded-cube

separation-of-planes-by-light

construction-before-effect

drawing-from-cast-and-life

method-drawing-instruction

Questions and answers

What is John Vanderpoel's The Human Figure?

It is his 1907 figure-drawing book, drawn from his lectures at the Art Institute of Chicago and illustrated with about 430 of his own charcoal and pencil drawings. It teaches the figure as large planes before detail, the head as a rounded cube, and the form read through light and shade. The Chicago Artists essay reports it sold 45,000 copies through ten editions by 1921, and it remains in print.

How did Vanderpoel teach you to draw the head?

As a block, not an oval. In his words, "imagine a cube with all its corners and edges rounded," so the head has a clear front, sides, top, and bottom, each catching light differently. Once you can feel those planes, even the ones hidden from your view, you have surfaces to model against and the head reads as solid.

What was Vanderpoel's method of figure drawing?

Large planes first, detail last. He held that the big planes of which the small forms are only a part must be understood before any feature is drawn, and he split the work into two periods: search for the relative place each part occupies, then turn that placed part into its actual form. He lit the model so the shadow showed where the planes turned.

Did Georgia O'Keeffe study under Vanderpoel?

Yes. O'Keeffe attended his lectures at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1905 to 1906. In her 1976 autobiography she called him "a very kind, generous little man, one of the few real teachers I have known," and said his lectures helped her with the cast and life classes. When the lectures became The Human Figure, she bought the book and kept it for years.

Who else did Vanderpoel teach?

His students include J. C. Leyendecker, the Saturday Evening Post and Arrow Collar illustrator, the American Impressionist Frederick Carl Frieseke, and Adam Emory Albright, among many across thirty years of Art Institute classes. His French teacher Gustave Boulanger also taught George Bridgman, which is why Vanderpoel's plane method and Bridgman's block method rhyme.

Was Vanderpoel a painter or only a teacher?

Both, though he is remembered for the teaching. He painted Dutch genre subjects, Chicago scenes, watercolours, and murals in oil, and exhibited at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. But his lasting work is the figure-drawing method, drilled in the Art Institute classroom and fixed in The Human Figure.

How long did Vanderpoel teach at the Art Institute of Chicago?

About thirty years, from 1880 until 1910, becoming chief instructor and lecturer in drawing around 1888 after two years of academic training at the Academie Julian in Paris. He left in 1910 for People's University in Missouri and died in 1911. A memorial exhibition of his work was held at the Art Institute the following year.

If this painter is your match

You build a figure from its big planes before you will let yourself draw a feature, because you know detail on a true structure holds and detail on a guess does not. You light your subject to show where the form turns, and you would rather start a fresh sheet than keep rendering a wrong placement.

Borrow this: Before any feature, lay in the large planes of the figure, the front, side, and top of each mass, and see the head as a cube with rounded corners. Light the model so the shadow marks where front turns to side. Place every part in relation to the whole first, then model it. Planes first, features last.

Adjacent painters

Louise Bourgeois1911–2010

A French-American sculptor who returned compulsively to drawing and painting through six decades of nightly insomnia, treated the daily mark as self-administered psychoanalysis, and built a private cosmology of red, spirals, spiders, and houses.

George Bridgman1864–1943

The Art Students League drawing teacher who built the figure from blocky masses set in perspective, fixed the structure and the movement before any surface detail, and trained a generation of American illustrators.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder1525–1569

A Flemish master who sketched the Alps on horseback in 1552 and for the rest of his life composed his panel paintings in the studio from a library of those drawings, a set of peasant-wedding field notes, and a habit of "moralizing" every scene through absurdist humor.

Eugène Delacroix1798–1863

A colourist who laid his entire palette out in graded pre-mixed tones before painting, kept his shadows coloured instead of black, and wove half-tones from juxtaposed strokes of pure colour.

Primary sources

John H. Vanderpoel, The Human Figure (The Inland Printer, Chicago), 1907. His foundational text, public domain, illustrated with about 430 of his own charcoal and pencil drawings. Source for the large planes before detail, the head as a rounded cube, the two periods of drawing, and lighting the form to separate the planes. Verbatim quotes confirmed against the djvu text. [link]
Essays on Chicago Artists, "John Henry Vanderpoel (1857-1911)" (illinoisart.org). Scholarly essay. Source for the teaching span, the basement skeletons and the "as if his very fingers thought" account, the ten-editions / 45,000-copies print run by 1921, the bowed back and lost eye, the William M. R. French eulogy, the Sorolla and O'Keeffe notes, and the summer outdoor classes. Single-source anecdotes are hedged in this record. [link]
The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, "Selections from the Abiquiu Bookroom: Early Instruction and a Retrospective". Quotes O'Keeffe's 1976 autobiography (Viking Press) on studying under Vanderpoel in 1905 to 1906, looking forward to his lectures, and buying and treasuring The Human Figure. [link]
John Vanderpoel, Wikidata Q6261807 and English Wikipedia. Verified live 2026-06-26. Dates (15 November 1857 to 2 May 1911), Academie Julian training under Boulanger and Lefebvre, and the named students Leyendecker, Frieseke, and O'Keeffe. [link]

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