A Lady with Three Suitors (c. 1500): Art, History and Details

A Lady with Three Suitors (c. 1500) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

This mysterious drawing shows an encounter between elegantly dressed members of the noble class. The French inscription above the image suggests that the woman is addressing her suitors and makes it clear that they are concerned with the pursuit of love: He who will conquer my love / This [barrier] must overcome / Neither destroying it nor loosening it / Going neither below it nor above. The style of the clothing reflects French court fashions during the reign of Charles VIII (1483–98), and the subject relates to the tradition of late medieval collections of love riddles that involved verbal exchanges between courtly ladies and gentlemen.

Object facts

• Title: A Lady with Three Suitors
• Date: c. 1500
• Culture: France
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: pen and brown ink, brush and brown wash, with traces of black chalk
• Dimensions: Sheet: 23 x 19.3 cm (9 1/16 x 7 5/8 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1956.40

A detail from the museum

The simple background and lack of landscape detail in this drawing suggest that the image may have been a model for a tapestry or other textile.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958.
• "Accessions of American and Canadian Museums, April - June 1958." The Art Quarterly 21, no. 3 (Autumn 1958).
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1966. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966.

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.