A Funeral (c. mid-1870s-early 1880s): Art, History and Details

A Funeral (c. mid-1870s-early 1880s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Jean-Paul Laurens (French, 1838–1921).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The macabre subject matter of A Funeral is typical of Jean-Paul Laurens, whose interest in depicting cadavers and coffins earned him the nickname "the painter of the dead." Laurens was also attracted to subjects from church history, and, here, the crosier leaning against the door behind the coffin indicates the deceased was a bishop. Highly finished drawings like this one are rare in Laurens's production. His technique of covering the surface with a variety of media and scratching away for highlights is quite similar to the one used by another artist in the exhibition-Alexandre Bida, in his Café at Constantinople [cat. no. 34]. Laurens utilized the technique effectively in this gloomy scene, where the glowing candle flame casts long shadows and feebly illuminates the columns receding into darkness on the left.

Object facts

• Title: A Funeral
• Date: c. mid-1870s-early 1880s
• Creator attribution: Jean-Paul Laurens (French, 1838–1921)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: charcoal and brush and black and brown ink, with stumping and scratching away
• Dimensions: Sheet: 40.1 x 29 cm (15 13/16 x 11 7/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2008.368

Collection credit

Bequest of Muriel Butkin

Further reading listed by the museum

• Foster, Carter E., Sylvain Bellenger, and Patrick Shaw Cable. French Master Drawings from the Collection of Muriel Butkin. [Cleveland, Ohio]: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2001.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.