Study for 'Charity,' St. Bartholomew's Church

Francis Augustus Lathrop's preparatory sketch depicts a seated woman cradling a child, rendered in ink with fluid drapery studies. This drawing served as a compositional study for a larger ecclesiastical commission at St. Bartholomew's Church in New York. Lathrop, a prominent American decorator and muralist of the Aesthetic Movement, employed quick gestural lines to establish figural relationships and fabric volumes before executing the finished work. The sketch demonstrates the artist's working method—exploring pose, proportion, and the interplay of light and shadow through draped cloth—techniques central to late-nineteenth-century academic practice.