A Woman from the Arctic (1826): Art, History and Details

A Woman from the Arctic (1826) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Léon Cogniet (French, 1794–1880).

The work and its context

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

When this painting was shown in an 1826 exhibition, the accompanying catalogue stated that it was "painted after nature." Although Léon Cogniet never traveled to North America, he may have encountered a native person from the Arctic. In 1820, an American sea captain, Samuel Hadlock, met two Inuit from Labrador, George Niakungitok and Mary Coonahnik, who accompanied Hadlock on a tour of America and Europe. The tour, an early example of a commercial show presenting people from lesser-known parts of the world to paying European audiences, concluded in Paris in 1826. The show also included a panoramic view of Baffin Bay (located between northeast Canada and Greenland) that may have inspired the cloudy sky and ice formations in Cogniet's painting.

Object facts

• Title: A Woman from the Arctic
• Date: 1826
• Creator attribution: Léon Cogniet (French, 1794–1880)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on fabric
• Dimensions: Framed: 62.9 x 57.2 x 8.9 cm (24 3/4 x 22 1/2 x 3 1/2 in.); Unframed: 42.5 x 36.5 cm (16 3/4 x 14 3/8 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1980.249

Collection credit

Bequest of Noah L. Butkin

Further reading listed by the museum

• Talbot, William S. "Cogniet and Vernet at the Villa Medici." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 67, no. 5 (1980): 135-49.
• Lee, Sherman E. “The Year in Review for 1980.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 68, no. 6 (June 1981): 163–219.
• Argencourt, Louise d', and Roger Diederen. Catalogue of Paintings. Pt. 4. European Paintings of the 19th Century. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1974.

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.